Need help with hdds

Someone please help!!!

I installed a new mobo (Asus P5G41T-MLX) and now only two of my partitions from 4 different drives are accessible. Please see screen shot of Disc Management to see what I mean. If you notice five other partitions show in disc management but I can't assign a drive letter to any of them and they show 100% free space. None of these partitions were empty before I changed the mobo. I am running Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit. Disk 0 and Disk 1 are IDE Drives and Disk 2 and Disk 3 are SATA drives.

For a start, Windows is install to disk 3, partition 1. C:

Did you do a brand new from-scratch Win7 install to go along with your new motherboard? I would have thought so.

It's interesting to note that all of your problem partitions are "primary". Only your one extended partition with a "logical" partition inside of it is visible and usable.

That one "logical" partition and also your C partition (with Win7 on it) is NTFS, and thus has a drive letter. The other partitions show "no file system" so not being able to assign a drive letter is not a surprise.

It's unclear how you got Win7 installed directly to that primary partition on drive 3 which is also marked as "active" (as it should be if there is no "system reserved", as there doesn't appear to be). Was this an old WinXP or Vista partition?

Interesting. I assume your Disk3 is shown in your BIOS as "hard disk #1"? Can't imagine any other way for Win7 to install there. Did you set the BIOS in your new ASUS mobo to point to that drive as "hard disk #1" before you installed Win7?

Still not sure how you got the install to go there, and no "system reserved" created... on a fresh Win7 install.

Did you change IDE/SATA cables on your drives after Win7 was installed?

What difference does that make if the computer will boot?

JeepnDave said:

What difference does that make if the computer will boot?

Obviously, the computer can boot. But only the C "primary" partition (on Disk3) is visible, plus I (the one "logical" partition) on Disk0.

This is all very odd, and I'm just thinking out loud. How did that one partition get lettered as I, unless all the other missing primary partitions had been assigned conceptual letters as well? There are five missing "primary" partitions (D, E, F, G, H, presumably) so that the "logical" partition of I at least looks plausible.

So why are those "primary" partitions that seem to have gotten letters now showing as no file system, and no letter?

I'm just thinking out loud.

About a year ago I was running XP Pro and upgraded to Win 7. During the upgrade Win 7 was installed on the now C: drive. About 3 weeks ago my old mobo quit working so I bought this new one, and I wanted to get back up and running quickly so I ran the Win 7 repair CD. Which let me boot back into Win 7 but would not let me access most of the other drives. Is there anything I can do to make these drive/partitions usable again with out doing a fresh install of Win 7?

Drive letters E: and F: are my CD and DVD drives.

Drive letters used to be (to the best of my memory)
C: 48.83gb
D: 26.55gb
(E: & F: CD & DVD)
H: 232.88gb
I: 439.24gb
J: 179.17gb
K: 4.88gb
M: 86.27gb

What was on these drives?

The fact there there is nothing in Disk Management to indicate what file system they're using suggests they're waiting for a quick format before you can use them.

Well, since you can manually re-letter anything any way you want (including your CD/DVD drives), the actual letters don't need to be sequential. All that matters is how many partitions you have, plus CD/DVD drives, plus card readers etc., and each will get a letter assigned... which you can obviously then change.

So we're really just concerned at the moment with why those partitions have seemingly become inaccessible. Presumably all of these partitions WERE formatted as NTFS and contained real data, before becoming inaccessible as a result of the motherboard swap and subsquent "repair".

Also, I think you've now explained how you ended up with that primary partition on Disk3 being your C partition, and "active", and no "system reserved". You upgraded WinXP to Win7 about a year ago and have been running that way ever since.


Now... are you saying that when your old motherboard died, you bought a new one? Was the old motherboard the same as the new one or not? Normally, if you make a hardware upgrade as significant as a totally new motherboard it is strongly recommended that a fresh from-scratch Win7 install be performed, but apparently whatever "repair" you did managed to at least get you up and partially working.

So, you did NOT do a fresh Win7 install when the new motherboard was installed, but rather used the system repair approach and perhaps "restored a system image" to this C partition? Or was it some other type of "repair" from the system recovery options menu?

Or if you did something other than what I'm imagining, exactly what did you do with the repair method to get yourself back up and operational once the new motherboard was installed?