Re: drive not seen in disk management

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Paul wrote:
philo wrote:
Don Phillipson wrote:
"philo" <philo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:hfdq3p$vi0$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

I wanted to backup some data...
so I popped a spare drive (know good) in an XP machine I was working on.

The drive (80 gig) is seen just fine by the bios
and if I look in the control panel...there it is...
no problems with it.

But nope...disk management does not see it at all

This is normal for an unformatted drive.




If the drive is not partitioned...it will not show up in Windows Explorer...
but it will (or should) show up in Disk Management...
after all, that's how you partition and format a new auxiliary drive.

In all the years I've been working on computers...this is a new one for me.


I guess there must just be something odd about that particular drive
as since I've posted...I tried another drive and it's recognized it normally

First step would be, what is in Device Manager ? There should
be a "trail of bread crumbs" left as a result of the new hardware
wizard finding a drive that wasn't present previously. See if
there is an entry in Device Manager for it.


Yes...I thought I mentioned it shows up normally in device manager...
no conflicts, no problems all looks normal

The file "setupapi.log" has some info from the work of the
new hardware wizard. Examine the tail end of that file for
recent changes.

If there is some evidence it is present in Device Manager, your
next step might be the port of "dd".

http://www.chrysocome.net/dd

dd --list



I am familiar with the dd command
but if there is no drive there is nothing for dd to operate on

The output from that command, shows both raw disk and partitions.
As the info on that web page shows, \\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition0
represents a whole, raw disk. Partition1 is the first partition
on the disk, so references to Partition1 imply a partition is
recognized. If a disk only had a Partition0 entry, it could be
that the MBR is empty or badly corrupted.

Using that port of dd, you could attempt to copy the MBR to a file.
For example

dd if=\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition0 of=mbr.bin bs=512 count=1

What that would do, is copy the first sector of Harddisk0 to the
file mbr.bin and place it in the current working directory of
your "DOS window". You can then examine the file with a hex
editor. The last two bytes would contain "aa55", the signature
that is meant to imply that some previous tool loaded a
valid MBR in there. If the last two bytes aren't a signature like
that, then somehow the MBR isn't valid (was never loaded in the
first place, or has been erased at some point).

If the four primary partition entries in that table were corrupt,
maybe that would be why Disk Management is playing dumb.

If you want to erase the MBR, giving Windows permission to start
over again, this would be an example of how to do it. This
wipes sector zero of Harddisk0. Of course, you have to use the
info in "dd --list" including sizes and the like, to be sure
you're pointing this command at the correct disk.

dd if=/dev/zero of=\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition0 bs=512 count=1

And if you accidentally pointed the previous command at the wrong
disk, and wiped out the MBR, the program "TestDisk" can recompute
the 64 bytes worth of primary partition info, while the Windows
Recovery Console "fixmbr" can put back the necessary 446 bytes
of boot code.

HTH,
Paul

Again...no matter what...the drive should have been seen in Disk Management...but it's not there..so from Windows there is nothing to operate on.

I think I'll keep fooling with it though...
.

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