computer gurus: need assistance.

[ttemper]

A few months back my primary slave hard drive stopped showing up in "my computer".It is showing up in the device manager, however.

 

I have a partion recover tool that allows me to view partitions on a drive, however, since it's a demo version it doesnt let me restore it. A friend of mine sent me a program that i used, which I think was the full version of the program I have. (Active partition recovery 2.1.1) The full version allowed me to restore it, but i must have deleted the program like an idiot.

 

I'm not sure why this has happened twice. The only logical thing I can think of is when I go to plug in a Mp3 player, or a "mass storage device" VIA usb the drive letter gets changed, forcing windows to "unassign" a drive.. for lack of better terminology.

 

I have 2 questions

1. Does anyone know where I can get the full version of this program without paying 30 bucks?(I can't get a hold of my friend because he's out of state for christmas)

2. IS there anyway to prevent this from happening again? My thought was to reformatt and a fresh install would automatically assign drive letters to all the storage devices I have.

 

TIA

[RelliK]

After talking on the phone with him about this I have resolved the following, the drive in question was working fine and was assigned the drive letter D: and when he went to plug in his IPOD or whatever MP3 player he has, the MP3 player got assigned the letter D: also, forcing the HD into never never land within Windows.

 

After stopping the USB MP3 player he removed it and the OS naturally unassigned the drive letter and the HD was not reassigned the D: and was where I said earlier in never never land.

 

So the HD data should be intact its just a matter of getting it back, I suggested either a program to recover the "lost" partition or even setting up the drive as a primary master on the second IDE channel to see if it recognizes the drive then and assigns it a letter.

[Casper]

Sounds more like the drive was starting to die and was losing its partition map.

[87GT]

Why can't you just force the letter of the hard drive to something like H or I so the ipod doesn't take it?

 

You should be able to do that with Computer Management in administrative tools. That is if it is Win2k or XP.