I regularly backup my two hard drives with Acronis for security PURPOSES. Today I find that my data drive had some important information missing.

Not to worry I thought, I'll just replace it with my backup - only 10 days old. However when I did so, Windows explorer didn't recognize the drive. The old one was a SEAGATE, the replacement is Western Digital. So I perused the internet looking for a driver. Failing to find one, I settled for having to install a NORTON-contaminated thing called Driver Manager.

Driver Manager tells me that everything is fine with this drive and that it doesn't NEED a driver. The Device Manager tells me that the drive is working fine but I still can't access the drive in Windows Explorer.

Can you help?

Windows XP sp3
2gb Ram
C drive 320 GB
data drive 750 GB

If you need any further info, LET me know. Thanks


HDD's do not require drivers...
Did you interrupt the Acronis restore process at anytime ? ? This will in fact make a drive "dissappear"...

I'd get rid of that Norton tool ASAP.I did remove the norton stuff. No, the Acronis process completed successfully.I like to share solutions. I ran diskmgmt.msc and discovered the drive was not assigned a letter. I did that and it worked fine - although my information was missing from that drive too.

Just in case this happens to anyone else.Then the Acronis backup was interrupted...It said it completed successfully. Who knows?

Strange thing was the missing info. Only one directory and its sub directories were purged of all files. It is the directory I use to download non-system data (i.e. stuff that doesn't pertain to PC operations or programs). They were empty. The other directories on the drive were fine.

I can think of nothing that caused this - I haven't referenced these directories in over a month. And the files I want are not found anywhere, so somehow something (I'm the only one using this computer) deleted them.

Antivirus produced nothing.

One ? - I use a free antivirus but was told that free antivirus packages are "passive" and was advised to pay for one that is "active". Is this true? I'm using AVG.