Missing Drive after Recovery

[wideboy1]

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

 

[SIW2]

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.

 

[wideboy1]

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

 

[mjf]

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.

 

[whs]

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.

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. http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/18629-user-folders-change-default-location.html