Windows 7: Missing Drive after Recovery

I've got a Packard Bell LJ71. It should have 2x500gb. Shortly after getting it I messed up some settings and did a recovery and now Windows 7 is only showing the 1 Drive (c) on the system. My hardware manager is showing 2 drives but one has no drive letter assigned.

When I go to disk manager it shows the whole drive as a healthy recovery partition but wont let me do anything else to it (right click only show help option)

Am I missing something? I'm quite PC savvy, but new to Windows 7.

How can I get the drive recognised by the system I only want it as extended/addidtional storage.

Please see attached

Hi Wideboy,

The "recovery" you did seems to have affected the patition type on Disk 0.

Try d/l ing the free Partition Wizard rt click Disk0 and post up the partition type it tells you.

Thanks for your response. Downloaded the free partition software and used it to activate the drive and re-assign a new drive letter. Though it wont let me choose (:d) as a drive letter, i can live with it.

Also, rather than it be a separate drive with its own folder structure, do you know if i can use it to just extend my c: drive, so when my c: gets full it just uses the 2nd drive to extend.

Thanks for your help

Windows disk management will show recovery partitions as 100% free (when they are not). Partition Wizard will show that it should contain ~8GB. You need to verify that disk 0 is empty and disk 1 recovery partition is populated.

Theoretically that is possible with a spanned drive. But that gets you into all kinds of deep yogurt including having to reinstall your OS. I would really not recommend that. Why dont you just move some (or all) user folders to that drive. That is a LOT easier and less painful. User Folders - Change Default Location