I am having trouble accessing a secondary hard drive on my computer. I
am running Windows XP Pro, and one day I disconnected my secondary
hard drive to connect my DVD-Rom drive.  I wanted to assign the the
DVD drive a different drive letter, but the one i wanted to give it
was being taken by the hard drive that was not currently connected to
the computer.  So i went to Disk Management and deleted that drive (I
realize this was very stupid) and assigned the DVD drive its drive
letter. Later when I reconnected my hard drive, it did not show up in
Windows Explorer. It showd up in Disk Management, and I selected
"Import Foreign Disk".  It still does not show up in Explorer (and is
therefore inaccessible) and only options I have in Disk Management
when I right click on the drive are 'New Volume' and 'Convert to Basic
Disk'. It shows as 153.38 GB Unallocated (its a 160 GB drive). How can
I get access to the files on this drive?  If I select New Volume, will
everything I had on that drive show up again?  Since I never formatted
the drive, the data should not be lost right?  I have like 80 GB of
music and pictures and important files on there and I really need to
get them back.

This is a Win XP Pro w/ SP2 system.

I guess you are trying to connect may be 2 secondary master drives
(DVD ROM and second hard disk) which will never show up on the
explorer.

Try changing the jumper (the next slot where you connect your data
cable to the disk) of the hard disk to a different secondary slave.

HTH

Hi,  Try this.

1.  Go to the Control Panel (Start/Control Panel)
2.  If you are in Category view, switch to Classic view (first option
in left pane of the Control Panel).
3.  Double click on Administrative Tools.
4.  Double click on Computer Management.
5.  In the left pane, expand Storage and select Disk Management.
6.  You will probably see that your DVD-ROM drive is assigned the
drive letter that used to be your secondary drive.
7.  Right click on the DVD-ROM drive and select Change Drive Letter and Paths...
8.  Click on the Change button and reassign the DVD-ROM drive to a
different, unused drive letter.
9.  Now right click on the secondary drive and, if there is already a
drive letter shown, click the change button as above if not, click on
the Add button.
10. Now reassign the drive letter of the secondary drive to letter
previously held by the DVD-ROM drive.

That's it.  I hope that solves your problem.

Ok, I changed the drive letter of the DVD drive, but the secondary
hard drive does  not have a drive letter and I don't see an Add
option.  The entire volume still shows up as unallocated.  If I try to
create a new Volume, will that allow me to access the data thats
already on the disk?

the jumpers and slave/master config isnt the problem.