My CPU fan bracket broke and the fan fell off causing the computer to shut down. After I replaced the fan my slave hard drive was no longer recognized as a logical drive although the system does see it; the problem is probably related to power failure or unusual shut down. Disk Manager sees the hard drive as "Unallocated". I would like to recover some data off this drive. 1) How can I assign a logical drive letter to the hard drive so that I can access the data? 2) Is there some software that I can use to recover the data myself? Would Norton PartitionMagic work in this situation? Remember the system does not see the hard drive as a logical drive.

PM won't work for this. You need a disk recovery utility. Web search or wait for others recommendations Give a person a fish, they eat for a day. Suggest they internet search and they learn a skill for a lifetime.

Thanks, wanderer. I kind of suspected that. I guess I'm looking for a disk recovery utility that can access the data on the hard drive even though it is not a logical drive on my system. Disk Manager shows the entire volume of the drive as "Unallocated". Nothing has been written over the data so I would assume the data is still there, just difficult to access. Any good suggestions would be appreciated.

I don't have any concrete help. But this has come up before, so it would be well worth knowing how you come out. I THINK it has to do with w2k keeping track of the individual HD. I'm not sure how. Probably not with the volume label. Maybe with the "Volume Serial Number" but I think it's a bit more obtuse. I put a HD which had been in an ext USB case and had been assigned drive letter u: onto internal IDE as slave, replacing a very similiar one which had been assigned drive letter d: Much to my surprise, it showed as u: I think that's a strong clue that w2k knows one physical HD from another. If you can figure out how, you may get out of the woods. If I had two very similar [ideally identical] HDs I'd set them up one at a time, assign them different letters, them one at a time use debug to load and save the first 200 hex bytes to files and compare the two files. Good luck. If at first you don't succeed, you're about average. M2

I may be on the track to a solution. See my new post "Stellar Phoenix Recovery Software". The results so far are VERY promising!

I'll slide over there. If at first you don't succeed, you're about average. M2