ATTN: Long Message :-) I was trying to be as detailed as possible.
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Hello:
A few days ago my desktop was running Windows ME. I started having trouble
with the OS and felt it was time to upgrade to XP (my laptop has had XP for
about a year and I have grown to like it more than ME). I have a 80GIG Hard
Drive on my desktop along with a 20GIG Hard Drive which I use to back up
files. Before installing XP (Full Home version, not an upgrade) I moved all
of the files I wanted to back up to the second 20 GIG Drive. The install
went smooth, and before I knew it XP was up and running.
After setting up a few basic settings I went to My Computer to bring some of
the files over from the second drive, but to my suprise the second drive was
not being listed at all. After looking around for a few minutes I found that
the drive is listed under the device manager and Disk Management, but not
listed in My computer, so I had no way of accessing it. Under the disk
management I noticed that there was no letter assigned to the drive and I
was not able to assign one either. By right-clicking on the drive the only
option I had was to delete the partition. It listed the drive as Healthy
and Active, but would not let me assign a letter to it. I did a rescan and
a refresh but nothing came of it.
I even went as far as uninstalling xp, formatting again, and re-installing
ME to see if that would show it...and nothing was there.
When in DOS I would try every possible drive letter and nothing showed up.
What was odd though was in both XP and ME, the drive was listed under the
device manager. Also, when I used FDISK, it listed the drive with all of
the info.
I then formatted again, put in the WIN XP CD, and click "R" for repair. To
my shock (and happiness) I noticed that the drive was listed under F:
(though there was no sign of that in DOS or when in the OS, I had tried F: a
few times). It also listed all of my files, but gave me no way of accessing
them. So I re-installed XP thinking that maybe now the files would be
listed under F: But no such luck. Once again though it is listed under disk
management. So where do I go from here????
I APOLOGIZE FOR SUCH A LONG MESSAGE, BUT WANTED TO BE AS DETAILED AS
POSSIBLE. I had seen this question asked many times during my never ending
Google search to find an answer, but did not see any answers....hopefully
someone out there has had this problem and can let me (and others) no how to
fix it. It is very important that I get these files on my drive.
Thanks
Adam
adamh05@yahoo.com