[RESOLVED] where did my hard drive's go ....

[surfacerider]

mobo ............. MSI 890GXM-G65
cpu ............... AMD PH-II X6 1100T 3.3G 9MB BX125W BLACK AM3
video ............. EAH5770 CUCore/2DI/1GD5 ( X , 2 in crossfire mode )
ram ............... Kingston HyperX 4GB 1600MHz DDR3 ( X , 4 Total 16 gigs )
Power supply .. Coolermaster Silent Pro 1000W Modular Power Supply
Running XP Pro on a Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB 7200 rpm 16MB IDE/EIDE , with a couple sata backup hard drives.


Ok new problem here .... my hard drives do not show up in admistrative tools , computer managment / disk management.

my dvd cdroms and my magic jack show up as drive's D: , E: , H: and J: ( H and J being my magic jack ) but not my hard drives I have 3 of them , IDE C: and 2 sata drives , F: and G:

What I need to do is rename my usb drive to A: , for 2 reasons , I have a automobile repair program that needs to install setup files on A: drive for validation when I install the program.

I also want to use , VirtualBox-4.0.4-70112-Win.exe to create a virtual drive and install windows 98 , so I can play some of my old dos based games and programs. And I think I will need to make a boot disk , I downloaded from boot disk dot com .... and it makes one on a floppy that i do not have and is not supported with my mobo ........

I can see them in windows explorer , but I don't have the option to rename the usb drive there.

Any ideas ....... surfacerider

[Midknyte]

The first thing I would do is move the optical drives to higher letters like R: and S:. XP tends to overlap optical drives and USB drives.

You can go into disk management and try to reassign the USB drive to A:. Make sure that the floppy is disabled in the bios, though. A: is typically reserved for floppies, so some systems may not like it.

[surfacerider]

Thanks , Midknyte .... but I've been there quite a few times front wards and backwards ...... my mobo does not support floppy drives ( no plug in for it ) so my guess the option to dissable it is not there.

With my last MSI K9N board it was and I had no trouble dissabling the flopy , renaming my drives ( have 5 with 2 dvd cdroms ) and my magic jack that actually shows up as 2 drives , H: and I:

I took a couple screen shots so maybe you can ubderstand what I am talking about ... all my drives show up when my computer boots also in my computer , windows explorer and admistrative tools defrag window. Just not in the disk management windo where I should be able to rename them.

[Midknyte]

Did you scan your system for malware/viruses? That can cause problems with disk management.

Did you run any "regsitry cleaners"? Those can cause weird problems.

Are there any errors in Event Viewer?

ram ............... Kingston HyperX 4GB 1600MHz DDR3 ( X , 4 Total 16 gigs)

Are you only running XP 32-bit? You need a 64-bit OS to properly recognize the full 16GB.

[Shinma]

Following may be applicable,

• LINK

[surfacerider]

Yes to all your sudjestions Midknyte , except the 64 bit , I'm just running 32 bit rite now I think , not sure I just bought XP Pro a few years ago and installed it. Is there any way to find out.

Next operating system I will definatly install a 64 bit version , be it another XP or windows 7 ( I'm still undecided if I'll get 7 ) , I'm really impressed with the way my system is running now , I started out way back when with a pentium 233 and windows 95

Shinma ....... thanks for the link , i downloaded a copy of Rootkit Detective ran the program and it found a bunch of files called " gasfkyykjxugno " i've included a copy of the scan report , renamed and then deleted them. Checked my admistrative tools and there they were my hard drives were back.

Thanks a million guys

surfacerider

[Shinma]

Glad we could assist.

[Midknyte]

I had a feeling it was malware. Sounds like you need better Antivirus/Antispyware.

Next operating system I will definatly install a 64 bit version , be it another XP or windows 7

Don't bother with XP64. It was hard to find drivers for it back then, and it'll be even harder going forward.