Help me replace my drive letter

[Peter965]

I have two 80gig hdd's in my puter.
I moved all my backup to "d" hdd.
Formated "c"hdd and reinstalled XP pro.
But then got into the blue bootup and started to format the "d"....and realized and stopped before the actual last step. So now in 'disc management' I have "c" and I can see the other drive but there is no assignment to it. and I cant access it. And in 'explore' its not there. Help on how to re-assign a letter to this drive so I can recover my data.
Thanks

 

[WinDoWsMoNoPoLy]

If you canceled it in the middle of the format of drive D you most likely lost all of the files as the files would of been at the beginning of the drive. Your only hope would be a 3rd party program.

 

[warbaby71]

hey peter
i see your problem there and have done the same sort of thing before with various drives and computers
there are a few options available to you depending on what programs you might have at your disposal.
firstly disc management i would suggest right clicking on your d: drive which currently has no label and you should see a create partition option which you would need to create to acces it. the next step is a should be to get a data recovery tool such as easy recovery pro or another such program and acces the drive recover your data (most data recovery programs require you have data saved to another drive whether its hard or optical or even network drive)
if the data recovery cannot enter the drive due to a non formated drive i would suggest formating with a quick format so as not destroy any more data.
you should hopefully at this piint have most of your data back and are then able to doa thourough format before putting your data back on your D drive

of course another option might be to use partition magic or acronis disk director to recreate your partitions and then after that use a recovery tool to recover data and so on and so forth.
hope that helps, i sure hope you manage to get all your data back (i know what its like to lose all valuble data)
good luck

 

[Peter965]

Thanks guys,

hey peter
i see your problem there and have done the same sort of thing before with various drives and computers
there are a few options available to you depending on what programs you might have at your disposal.
firstly disc management i would suggest right clicking on your d: drive which currently has no label and you should see a create partition option which you would need to create to acces it. the next step is a should be to get a data recovery tool such as easy recovery pro or another such program and acces the drive recover your data (most data recovery programs require you have data saved to another drive whether its hard or optical or even network drive)
if the data recovery cannot enter the drive due to a non formated drive i would suggest formating with a quick format so as not destroy any more data.
you should hopefully at this piint have most of your data back and are then able to doa thourough format before putting your data back on your D drive

of course another option might be to use partition magic or acronis disk director to recreate your partitions and then after that use a recovery tool to recover data and so on and so forth.
hope that helps, i sure hope you manage to get all your data back (i know what its like to lose all valuble data)
good luck

warbaby71,
If I creat a partition, will it do exactly that, ?? I was thinking that if I partition, it may need to format to do it. (Just asking before I take the wrong steps.)
I was not sure if quick format erased everything on the drive or not?
Do I get the option of quick/full format when I rightclick and go format?.

Thanks for all your help
Peter

 

[Lekki_Sheep]

It'll create a partition alright, but every time you change anything about that disk you're likely to loose more of the data you backed up to it. You should find a third-party disk recovery package like WinDoWsMoNoPoLy suggested, install it on your C: partition and use it to see how much you can recover before doing anything else with the disk.

Just to be clear, we are talking about a separate physical drive here that used to have the logical drive letter allocation d:, not a separate partition you've used to back up to while installing a fresh copy of XP right?

I can't think of any suggestions for 3rd-party recovery software, but you might find something appropriate in the download section of techspot. Failing that I'll get back to you with details as soon as I can review our utils section at work (I'm at a different site and have no remote access to the pdc from here).

 

[Peter965]

Lekki,
Yes the 'd' is a totaly seperate 80 g internal drive. I will look up a program like WinDoWsMoNoPoLy said and check it out.
Thank you