Vista reinstall - 2nd HD with data now appears Not Initialized

druekberg

Member
After a fresh reinstall of Vista x64, I can no longer access my 2nd HD. It doesn't show up in Explorer. It does show in Disk Management as "Unallocated" and "Not initialized." I don't want to initialize it because it has data on it.

I reinstalled Vista x64 on my HP desktop because I'd been having so many problems I decided to try installing Win7 over it. I wanted to start with a fresh install of Vista to reduce chances of failure of 7 (which means I would resort to a new system).

I used HP's recovery software. At first I ran it off the D partition on Disk 0 but twice ran into memory errors and installation failed. Then tried from the recovery disks. Also had errors. So I disconnected the second drive I had installed a year ago and ran recovery from D and it installed fine.

However, all my personal data is on 2 partitions on the second drive (Disk 1).

Disk 0 contains drive C and D. C contains Vista x64 OS and D is the recovery partiition.

Dist 1 contained 2 partitions: I had named them N and R. N contains large video files. R is all my other personal data. All Personal Folders (Documents, Pictures, Music etc.) had previously pointed to R. (I don't care about the drive letters; I can reassign those once I get it going.)

Disk 0 came with the HP. It is a Samsung HD 501L (500 GB)

Disk 1 is a WD 20EARS (Green 2 TB disk). I added this a year ago and it has worked fine.

I do have backups of all my personal files on an external drive, but not the videos. I would prefer not to lose those, or have to go through a restore of my backups either.

Anyone have suggestions for how to get Vista to recognize this drive as initialized, partitioned, and full of data?

Thanks.
 

My Computer

One more thing: after it first showed up as unallocated, not finding any solutions online, I shut down, then unplugged the SATA and power cables again. No improvement.

Also, in the BIOS, there are listings for 6 drives. 1st and 2nd are empty. The Samsung is listed as drive 3. 4th and 5th are empty. The WD is listed as drive 6.

Drive controller is listed in Device Manager under "Storage Controllers" as NVIDIA nForce Serial ATA Controller." All working. WD drive also shows up under "Disk Drives" as working.
 

My Computer

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