Second hard drive not visible

**LoraB** · August 19th, 2012, 12:01 PM

I replaced a failing hard drive but want to see if I can get the data off the old one. I have installed the old drive on the secondary IDE as a secondary drive (primary drive on that cable is the CD ROM). The old drive will spin, and it shows up under device manager but not on the list of available drives under my computer. How do I get the drive to show up so I can look at the files?

**stroyal** · August 19th, 2012, 12:59 PM

If it is XP, you may have to initialize it, or something like that. 7 is the similar.

Go into Administrative tools, and check Disk management.

start/control panel/administrative tools/computer management/ disk management.

Welcome to TechIMO!

**LoraB** · August 19th, 2012, 01:27 PM

Thanks for the response. We have been there. It is not showing up when we look at disk management. We have gone to device manager and it shows up there sometimes, but sometimes goes away (because the drive is failing??) When we do a scan for installed hardware, the drive will show back up but still won't show in disk manager. We have tried unplugging the cd/rom and putting both hard drives on the same cable but that didn't change anything. We are putting the computer back the way it was but really had hoped since it was visible on device manager that we could assign a drive and actually access it.
Yes, we are on XP and these are IDE drives. I had to format the new drive and install all the software on it. I set up a partition when I was formatting, would that have anything to do with the computer not able to see additional drives?

BF wants to know if we can put the old hard drive on the same IDE channel as the CD/ROM? That is what we were doing but maybe that is not correct? All research I have done so far indicates we should be able to see the drive. Should we mess with the jumper settings? Does that have anything to do with it? We have been experimenting but maybe this all boils down to a bad drive (but why would device manager see it then??)

**Steve R Jones** · August 20th, 2012, 05:02 AM

Is the cd set to Master?
And or set both drives to Cable Select.

**stroyal** · August 20th, 2012, 08:53 AM

Jumpers should defiantly be messes with, or is not going to work, unless you lucky at Russian Roulette.

There are some hard drives that won't work with CDs but it is not the rule.
I've had 2 CDs that won't work together.

As Steve said you need a Master and a Slave, or both set to CS.

You intermittent appearance, sounds like jumpers are set wrong.

**JEROY** · August 21st, 2012, 01:52 AM

Most likely a jumper,s issue ... Try to put the old drive on ide channel 2 alone while putting the jumper in CS mode ( CS=Cable select ) ...

**LoraB** · August 21st, 2012, 03:21 PM

Both drives were initially set to CS. We tried switching them to master and slave but that didn't help. We had the old drive on channel 2 by itself, but I don't remember what the jumper was set on at the time. If I get the chance tonight, I will try that one again with the jumper at CS and see if that does the trick. At this point, it looks like the old drive is destined to be a nice paperweight. Thanks for the help though.

**stroyal** · August 21st, 2012, 03:49 PM

That sounds bad.
I hope you have backup

If it is really valuable data, it can still be recovered by a recovery service.
I've never really looked into the price, but exorbitant is usually in the description.

If you have to have it back though, it is possible.

Another option is a program called Spinrite
GRC*|*Hard drive data recovery software**

It is the best hard drive recovery software in the business, AFAIK.
Steve Gibson is also one of the best in the security business.

This won't fix motors, and bearing like the services, but it works on bad disks, and corrupt data.

Hope this helps.

**LoraB** · August 21st, 2012, 04:27 PM

Stroyal, thanks for the suggestion. I had some warning that it was having trouble so I got everything backed up to the laptop except the music. I guess anything I don't have on CD is lost, but nothing really important is gone. That is why we have been playing with it to see if we could recover just the music. We even removed the cover off the hard drive. For whatever reason that caused the drive to stop the clunking it was doing. That allowed us to boot up with it connected but we just can't get the disk manager to see it so we can copy files from it. Oh well. It was an interesting experiment.

**stroyal** · August 21st, 2012, 05:57 PM

Interesting, I've taken the cover off many hard drives, but never tried to run it that way.

All that is supposed to be done in a clean room, but there was a story on the net a few years ago, it might have even been on this forum.

The guy bought an identical hard drive, and swapped out some of the parts, without a clean room, and it worked.
That's what those recovery services do if they have to.
Sometimes they transfer just the disks to a new drive

It never hurts to try, well almost never.

**JEROY** · August 22nd, 2012, 04:57 AM

Nice try but When you open a Hard Disk cover , day light will destroy any chance of recovering anything . The Discs should be open in a infra red light environment , just like the photographers do ..

**LoraB** · August 23rd, 2012, 07:58 PM

Well, whatever damage we did by opening it up and running it without the cover we were prepared for. I mean, we went into that step knowing we had nothing to lose and only something to gain. If it didn't work, the drive was already toast anyway.