Hard drive not recognized

Hello

I just formatted my primary hard drive but before doing so I copied all of my important data to my 40GB backup drive. I turned off my computer and unpluged both the ide and power cables of the secondary (backup) drive just to be safe and I turned my computer back on with the windows disk in the drive bay so I could start formating. Everything went well, I installed windows and all of my programs and applications.



Then, I turned my computer off again, unpluged the psu and reconnected my slave (backup) hard drive. After I turned my computer back on though, Windows doesn't show the second hard drive in My Computer. However, it does show in the device manager under disk drives. Regardless, I cannot access the files on the drive as windows does not display the drive in my computer.



Do any of you know what's up?



Thanks in advance.

Go into Drive Management and see what's up. You may have to assign it a drive letter.



Go to Start > Run and type in compmgmt.msc. Find Drive Management in there and look for your drive.

Awesome... I didn't know about compmgmt.msc That's good to know



One thing though... I've found the drive, how do I assign it a drive letter?

Right click on the drive and select "Change Drive Letter and Paths...".

I tried that but the that option is not available to click (it's light grey and can't be clicked). ????

Ummmm... Ok? I have no explanation for that. Might be time for some Google.

Haha, alright... thanks for all of your help anyway. At least you got me on the right track.



Does anyone else have any suggestions?

if you right click on where it says disk 1 can you select the option to initialize it?



Is there data on here you can't lose?

It's already initialized.. It says "Online". That's the part I can't figure out at the moment...