I have an old (about 7 years old) IDE 40 GB hard drive that I use as a second DATA drive in my desktop PC. It’s worked flawlessly for years. For background, I’m working in Windows XP SP2 on a Dell 2400. I have the drive set in the “slave” mode via the jumper pins. When I ORIGINALLY installed the drive, my PC recognized it right away, automatically assigned it a drive letter, and life has been fine since.

Until the other day, when the drive suddenly disappeared – when I click on “My Computer,” only my main “C” drive shows up under Hard Disk Drives. It used to show a “C” and a “J” drives.

However, when I go into Devise Manager and look under Disk Drives, BOTH hard drives are there, with their unique ID numbers. So to some extent, my computer is recognizing this slave drive. However, there’s no way to get to the data on it.

I hear no obviously clicking or noise from the drive. The drive appears to be getting power since it’s warm (not hot) to the touch when the PC is on, and I feel a slight vibration when I touch the drive when the computer is on.

A few things I already checked:

* I changed the power cable and the ribbon cable. No help.

* I installed this slave drive in another similar desktop that I own. Interestingly, Windows XP automatically detected the new hardware and installed it. However, like on the original PC, the drive is visible in Devise Manager, but does not appear in My Computer. (No drive letter was assigned.)

* As a double check, I took the slave drive from this other computer and installed it in the original PC. It recognized the slave drive right away, assigning it the drive letter “J” in My Computer and allowing full access.

So, it appears that I ruled out any motherboard problems, cable failures, or Windows problems.

I would like to be able to recover the data on this slave drive. Does anyone have any suggestions on what to do? Is there any recovery software that might work? Or, does this sound like a mechanical issue with the drive?
Right clik My Computer....select Manage...then Disk Management.
Right clik the drive and select properties...
Report back with the results.I am at work, the computer in question is at home. But I can tell you that I did that and it REPORTED that the devise is working fine and the driver is up to date.

Quote from: patio on September 23, 2009, 10:25:37 AM

Right clik My Computer....select Manage...then Disk Management.
Right clik the drive and select properties...
Report back with the results.

I have an old (about 7 years old) IDE 40 GB hard drive that I use as a second data drive in my desktop PC. It’s worked flawlessly for years....