StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Okay. When I moved out of my old apartment last month, my secondary hard drive worked fine. When I moved into the new place, I put my computer together and it didn't work anymore.

There seems to be nothing physically wrong with it. It gets power, doesn't make any odd noises, and appears to be physically functioning normally. However, Windows refuses to acknowledge its presence; it insists that there is no drive F:\.

I have no idea how the fuck to fix this when I can't even get my computer to acknowledge the drive's presence. Nothing on there is critical, but there's a lot of it that's irreplaceable, so I'd really love to get it functioning again (and then immediately back it up to a new drive, of course). Does anyone have a clue what to do about it?

Buy an IDE to USB adapter (or SATA to USB adapter, if appropriate). It'll let you treat the hard drive like an external USB one, which Windows should be able to recognize. That should allow you to get the data you need off of it.

I already did that. Windows refused to acknowledge that anything was plugged into the USB port. (It's not a problem with the USB port; it acknowledges every other USB device I care to plug into it.)

It could be that Windows is being silly and not assigning it a drive letter.

Click on "Start" then right click "My Computer" and choose "Manage" to bring up the "Computer Management" window.
Once you're on that window, go to "Disk Management" and see if Windows can see your hard drive, but just hasn't given it a letter.
If you can see it, you can right click it and choose the option to give it a letter.

I've had this happen to me when Windows helpfully tried to give a USB stick the same letter as a mapped drive; hilarity ensued.

Robin's idea might work, too.

Have you tried hooking it to another box, or are the results the same?

I could assume that you've already done this, but I won't. When it's installed as an IDE drive can BIOS see the drive? When you boot up the system, you should see all of the various messages, including what IDE devices are installed. If BIOS can't see it, then Windows sure as hell can't.

If BIOS can see it but windows can't, GetDataBack[FAT][NTFS] might be able to do some good, they search the drive for partitions and attempt to recover data.