hard drive not recognized

[Quark Neutrino]

Originally, i had a primary hard drive (western digital, 345 MB) which contained system software and a seconary hard drive (maxtor 1.2 GB) which contained all of my work. Due to a physical malfunction, the primary hard drive crashed, and i couldn't acess my computer at all without a boot disk. When i used the boot disk, it would not access the secondary hard drive. I replaced the damaged hard drive with a new one (western digital 814 MB) and reformatted and repartitioned it as a new MS-DOS primary hard drive. My problem is that i still cannot access the secondary hard drive. The really puzzling part is that while the internal BIOS recognizes the physical presence of the secondary hard drive (maxtor 1.2 GB), the operating system (MS-DOS 6.22) does not. I've tried using Fdisk, but it refuses to acknowledge the mystery device as well. Can someone please help me reconfigure my system to recognize the drive _without_ losing any of the data i have stored on it? thanks in advance.

[Igor M]

Hi,

In my experience I saw just one case when Fdisk can't recognize HDD recognezed by BIOS - it was boot virus (unless the drive is damaged of course). Try to boot with boot disk known for sure as uninfected and run some antivirus software.

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Good luck, Igor M

[theresa_M]

Try your pin congiguration on your hard drive double check that it is set as a master and not configured as a slave. Your BIO's will realise there is a device there but it won't know how to acces it if the configuration isn't right.

[Ronnie Ratt]

Can you test your other drive on someone else's P.C., you won't have to physically install it just have the right cables and use 'Auto-Detect' and run Fdisk to see if it detects it, if that don't work it might be stuffed.