Just reformatted - 2nd drive wont show

I just reformated my computer today and it has 2 HD's. The C drive was the one that was formatted.

After that was done I installed all the usuall stuff but I noticed my F drive (2nd HD) was not in the my computer.

I went to Admin Tools to Disk Management and not even a Rescan Disks showed it there.

I then rebooted and went into BIOS to see if it showed up there and it DID.

So right now I am kind of stumped.

I would like to get the F drive showing again WITHOUT reformatting it. It has many importiant files and things that I can not afford to lose.

The hard drive is a Dimond Maxtor plus 9 - 6Y16 - 160gb ATA/133HDD

Any help would be awesome, thanks !

When you say "C drive" and "F Drive" your talking about logical drive letters, I just want to make sure that you actually have 2 physical drives attached to the system and not one partitioned hard drive. I don't mean to be insulting, but I have seen some people make similar mistakes.

You said you did a rescan of the disks in computer management.

Does the drive appear in Device Manager?

Go to IDE/ATA in device manager right click primary ide and scan for changes then do same for secondary controller.

Rescan the disks again.

Sure you didnt do anything else like change drive jumpers or cable configuration?

Windows XP Sp1 only sees upto 137GB per drive. Did you service pack from MS after install and patch with critical updates? If not this will probably be it!!

Sounds like you killed a logical drive.

If you know for sure you have two physical disks do the following.

Go to start - run and type "diskpart"
You get a command prompt DISKPART>

type "list disk"

If there are two physical drives they will be listed as Disk 0 & Disk 1

Status should be online for both if you have two disks.

Type "select disk 0" - This will focus on disk0

Type "detail disk"

This will give you disk id, type, name drive letter, file system, size and status and info. If info = system then this is the boot disk your c: drive.

Type "select disk 1" to change focus to the other disk.

Type "detail disk" you will get info on the other disk. The disk ID will be different if you have two physical drives. If it is the same you have one physical disk with two drives eg:c & f on it.

Do not type any of the other commands. If you use the wrong one by mistake you will kill the system.

Did you delete the partitions at the start of the install during the blue screen???