Partitions not visible anymore

I successfully installed Disk Director / OS Director at the weekend. I have two hard drives, each divided up into three partitions. Acronis is installed in (say) drive 1, on the C:

I successfully installed Windows XP on both disks, on the primary partitions, with drive 1 being the default. All seemed well.

Today, I'm finding that when I boot to drive 2, it will do so, but now I can't access the two partitioned logical drives (D and E) from the OS (Windows XP) drive 2. Only the primary drive with the OS installed is accessible. I have no idea why that happened.

If I boot back to drive 1 and go into Disk Director, select the two (now) unaccessable logical drives on drive 2 and click 'Explore', I can see that the data is still there. Both drives are marked as not being hidden, but they are not active either. The box to make them active is greyed out.

While I'm mildly curious regarding how it happened, I'm more curious on how I can access the two drives once more from Drive 2 and make them active.

Hope that's clear, let me know if not.

Any ideas?

TIA.

 

Are you booting using OSS?

For the logical partitions, check in Windows Disk Management and see if you just need to assign drive letters to the partitions. That may be all you need.

 

Yup, booting from OSS.

I'll try the Disk Management thing. It might have something to do with my forgetting to unplug this WD MyBook external hard drive when I rebooted, and all the letter assignments became screwed up.

Sidenote: Don't buy a Western Digital MyBook external hard drive. A complete pile of rubbish, plays havoc if you have more than one bootable partition in OSS. If you boot with it plugged in, Windows then tries to do a checkdisk on it (and doesn't get very far...)

Thanks for the tip, I'll try that later today and let you know.

 

Hi speedyvespa,

Are you using Windows XP Boot Manager or are you using another Boot Manager?

I have learned if you are using a Boot Manager, that even thou you are telling it which partition to boot to, you still need to list all the other partitions, you want the operating system to have access to.

 

I'm using the Acronis OS Selector. Is that a poor decision? I haven't investigated the Windows XP Boot Manager.

Or am I not understanding the question here? Apologies, I'm new to the concept of implementing multiple OSs on one machine.

 

If you're using OSS and it's working okay for you, then don't worry about it.

There are just differences in how drives are detected and need to be setup depending on whether you're using OSS or multi-booting with the Windows bootloader.

Check if you can assign drive letters to your partitions using Windows Disk Management first. If that doesn't fix the problem, then post back.

 

I have a similar problem. I have two Samsung HDD:s E: and F: they are both identical and both claim to be 120 GB that is 111,79 GB they have worked fine for over a year. Now all of the sudden the other one says it is not formatted. When I look at my disk with the Disk management tool (Windows) it says that the other one is now 186.31 . I have now updated the bios in the machine and looked at the disk with Disk Manager it claims I have two partitions one is 120 GB and the other is 200 GB this would be fantastic if it were true. I deleted the 200 GB partition and thought this would do it. Now I have an unpartitioned disk of 186 GB. The data is still on the disk since nothing has been removed. I cannot find anybody at Samsung to answer my questions. What should I do ?

 

OK - here's what happened. I tried to allocate the drives with letters (indeed, they had none assigned) via Disk Management. However, the properties list didn't have the option to change the drive letter.

So I went back into Acronis Disk Director and reassigned disk letters from there (rather reluctantly so, as it kind of screwed up the letter allocation - my PC has a lot of drives and getting them in order is a big pain). Rebooted, and hey presto, all available again on drive 2, data intact, all was well - apart from a very goofy drive letter assignment system which I've decided I'm going to try and live with!

Thanks for the help.