yesterday i was defragmenting my D drive and i tried to open winamp (yeah i know it's stupid but i was bored). When i opened it my computer crashed and it restarted on its own. When i logged on back to windows i couldn't see my C & E drives but i can see my hard disk in the device manager which means it isn't "burnt". so what's wrong with it?

Well, I'm assuming that your windows installation is on drive c so it's obviously ok as far as all that goes. Usually when something happens as a result of a system crash in windows, it most often is a corrupted file (such as device drives and the like). You may be able to resolve this by doing an add new hardware and see if windows will detect the missing/corrupted device(s). borelli34

the device isn't corrupted or missing. i can see the device in device manager. when i click on properties it says that the device is working properly but i can't enable/disable it and i can't see any of my files, it's like this hard disk doesn't exist... my windows is on D, that's why i was able to log on back to windows.

try to run scandisk . if that does not work try fdisk and see if it will see all drives. if it does goto option 5 (i think) to select drive and than option 4(?) to see what it says about partitions on the drive do it for each drive. you my have damage the MBR(master boot record). One qestion do you have 3 hdds drives or 1 partitioned as 3.

i have 2 hard disks but one of them (the one that is "damaged") is partitioned as 2 (C & E)

did you try scandisk ? does it see the hdd? did you try fdisk? try start/run/ type in c:dir/p does it work? or error? do same for e:

here's what i did: i inserted the boot cd in the cd drive and went to bios. I ran fdisk and it said (option 5): Disk: 1 2 Drv: Mbytes: 19093 38170 Free: 19093 Usage: % 100% C: 38170 (the "damaged" disk is 1, everything that is 1st replies to disk 1 except for the last one) And in Set Active Partition (I chose Disk 1) option is says "No partitions defined" and "No partitions to make active" In bios when i press delete i go to autodetection and i see the hard disk and it doesn't seem corrupted or anything. Once again in bios i can't see the "damaged" drive. it doesn't have an error. In bios C: seems to be the 40gb disk, D: is ramdrive, and E: is the cdrom. I've tried making the 20gb disk slave but nothing happened. I don't want to have to format that disk (even though i don't know how that would be possible since i can't see it even in the bios). but if that's the only solution,tell me how to do it.