Detected Slave Drive Not Showing Up

[Vyk]

So I have two bad hard drives from an old computer. Their only real problem is that they can't boot. I had the one (a 12gig) as a slave on my mom's computer for a while. But the other one (a 80gig) didn't work with hers. It crapped out first, so at first I had the 80gig as a slave to the 12gig. Well, when replacing a network card, I didn't install the driver first and screwed up the 12gig too. That's when I tried slaving them to my mom's computer. Anyway. Of course I have a new computer these days. But I've been averse to messing with its guts much while its under warranty. The warranty expires next month so I figure it might be a good time. I had access to the 12gig stuff on my mom's so that's not a big deal. So I put in the 80gig (and it was weird. The hard drive in there doesn't use an IDE cable. It has some thinner cable connecting it to the mother board. You techies probably know, but its new to me. But the motherboard had a spare IDE slot which I can only assume is for slaves. As there wasn't any spare slots open in the one connected to the DVD-ROMS as I'd assume there would be since most computers today are built to be ready for upgrades like this, anyway) so I boot up with fingers crossed, and it seemed I'd guessed right. Windows loaded okay, detected new hardware, realized it was a hard disk, and that was it. I go to My Computer and it's not there. I reboot and it's not there. There doesn't seem to be any problem, it obviously can detect it. Any ideas why its not showing up?

[Samuraid]

The smaller cable on your newer hard drive is likely a Serial ATA cable (called SATA for short).

As for the HDD not showing up...it may be having hardware problems or the partitions could be unmounted or unrecognizable.

Try right clicking on My Computer, and select "Manage" from the menu.

The computer management console should load. Select "Disk Management" from the menu and there should be a listing showing all the drives in the computer and all their partitions. Check to see if the new drive you added is listed there and post the results here.

[Vyk]

Disk 0
Unknown
74.53GB
Not Initialized

And there's a box beside that with a black bar above it (the working ones have blue bars on them) that says Unallocated

Edit: This is all way out of my league, so whatever comes next, I hope it can come in layman's terms ^_^

[Samuraid]

Well, windows recognizes that a drive is there, but you would have to initialize the drive before you could use it. I'm not sure if that means you will lose all the information currently on the drive, but I expect that to be the case as the next step is often formatting the disk. (I could easily be wrong though, so someone post if my information is faulty)

[ShunNakamura]

I was fairly sure Samuraid was correct. But just to double check I ran a couple of quick google searches and come up with that it will be formated in some form or another from what I have seen.

I can quote the info if you so desire.

Now if you want to save the info on the hard disk, you can 'try' to see it and copy it through a DOS bootdisk. It sounds as if you are using on of the newer win operating systems that may have installed NTFS file system; thus, you may need to get DOS to see NTFS through a special boot disk to copy the files. That is if anything is visible on the drive to begin with.

All that last paragraph was for is that if I were you I would also see if DOS can see anything concerning the drive(in other words see if it is purely a windows problem or not), before I went through the intialization steps.

[Vyk]

So I take it the partitioning thing is next? DOS doesn't interest me. I'll just forgo everything on it. As long as I can use it I suppose that'll have to do. I don't have an A: drive to do the bootdisk thing anyway. Though I suppose I could put it on an SD card and get the same result, but it doesn't matter.

[Samuraid]

If you don't care about any of the previous data on the drive, then yes, formatting is the next step.

[Vyk]

Hmm... it lets me create a partition of the whole drive, but then it asks if I want to format it to NTSF (with a few other options) or not format it at all. Can you partition without a format? O_o; And if so, if I tried that, do you think the stuff on there would still be available, or is that something you might only want to do with an empty drive

[Samuraid]

At this point, I don't think you could get to any provious data on the disk without special software. I'm not sure what specific software to use though.

[o_O]

I'm fairly sure the only way that you're going to get anything substantial off of that disk is by using some kind of forensic software, like EnCase or Forensic Toolkit Suite, since it's doubtful that the filesystem is still intact. The catch is that a licensed copy of that software costs around $US10k. A computer forensics lab will do it for you fairly cheaply though.

[Vyk]

Alrighty, I'll just do a full format partition. Thanks a lot you guys :D It looks like my computer will be happy to have it on board once that's done.