HDD doesn't appear on "my computer"

Hello and thanks for looking at my post. I've looked through the forums and so far haven't found an answer that works for my problem.

recently I added a new HDD into my friend's comp, moved some HDDs into different bays, etc. After I made sure that everything was connected again, I closed it and started Windows XP up. When I went to "my computer", the new drive and another drive I had moved didn't appear. When I open "device manager" and "disc management", the 2 drives are there.

When I formatted the brand new drive in "disc management", it appeared in "my computer" as "New Volume (F" and was working. I thought that maybe if I changed the drive letter of the other one it would work, but it won't give that option. When I right click on the drive, the only options I have are "delete partition" and "help". Re-formating the drive isn't an option, since it contains a lot of stuff not easily replaced (I know, always back up your data on CD) and right now I'm stumped. I'd greatly appreciate any help with this problem.

try this chkdsk f: /f

Its a command in command prompt, and it may bring back the drive.

Sorry for posting in this thread。 I have a very similar but worse problem. I have a 500G data IDE hard drive (by Seagate) full with useful files without backup. Sometime ago I attempted to move this HDD from my main pc to my HTPC. However, "my computer" in my HTPC didn't recognize this drive even though it showed up in the Bios and "Device Manager". The "Disk Management" displayed it as "Unknowen" and "Uninitialized". Both pcs are running XP Pro and the drive is set to Slave.

To make thing worse, exact same thing happened when I remounted the drive back in my main pc. "My Computer" in my main PC wouldn't recognize this drive either even this drive was installed and run fine in this pc not too long ago.

I will really appreciate any suggestion . Thank you very much.

Perhaps you could try accessing the drive through a different OS, namely Ubuntu Linux because you could simply boot off of its CD and run it "Live", or in other words run it off the CD without actually installing the OS.

My main pc has a SATA dvd drive and I have tried disconnecting dvd drive in HTPC. No luck.

Problem solved !!!! (probably)

I tried using Knoppix Ver 3.4 and I could read the data on the messed up drive, but not write to any hard drive (Knoppox automatically sets mounted drives to "read only" ). I tried changing the drive's properties to "enable read/write", but Unix has a hard time working with Windows NTFS. There is a way my version of Knoppix to deal with NTFS, but for some reason it wasn't working for me. I didn't want to spend even more time trying to find out why, so I downloaded 'Partition Find and Mount' and ran it.

After a little read of the instructions and running a scan on the drive through it, I had the drive showing up in 'My Computer'. Since PF&M doesn't mount a drive so you can write to it, I will be moving all the data to somewhere more stable. It's about 75GB worth of stuff, so it'll take some time but the dozen or so picture, music, and movie files seem O.K.

Once again, thanks to you all for your help and suggestions!