Can't see drive letter of HDD

[roadster]

My mate came back from holiday and plugged his external HDD into his PC but it refused to be recognised. He stripped it out of the case and I now have it plugged directly into my PC. The bios sees it but it has no drive letter. It is a Maxtor DiamondMax 10 200gb. I ran the Maxtor diagnostic and it says that the partion table is empty.

He has about 20 gigs of photos on the drive .........

HELP!!!

H

Both on XP Home by the way

[phishhead]

might have to go to a recovery console and type fix/mbr...your master boot record might be corrupt.

[efc]

Before going too far, check the cable.

[roadster]

Before going too far, check the cable.
Cables are all OK and as its now plugged directly into my PC using my previously working connections I am quite confident of that.

If I do the Recovery Console thing will the data be preserved?

[FastGame]

If I do the Recovery Console thing will the data be preserved? Yes

[phishhead]

when you fdisk the mbr it basically reindexes the mbr. like when you reindex a database.

[roadster]

I installed the Recovery Console (I cant run it from the cd as I have to use the IDE cable to connect the duff hard drive, its pata, my other being sata) but when I boot into it I get a blue screen saying that there is something wrong with the existing hard drive:eek:

This happens if the duff hd is connected or not. The pc boots OK normally................

Puzzled

H

[roadster]

Bye the way, Console works fine booting from the cd......but I can't get the cd and the hard drive in the case at the same time.........Grrrrrrr

[roadster]

Finally got the mbr fixed and the drive worked:) but only for a short while:( . Looks like it has a fault as it is now displaying exactly the same symptoms again.

[efc]

Bummer. Sounds like you better save data files and get a new one.