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Strangely since two days, the D, E, F, and G drives are not showing up in my Windows 7 Home Premium desktop.

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I tried all the solutions that are available online such as going into Disk Management and Re-assigning the letters. Strangely, I can't see the drives there too. I tried Re-scanning the discs, but no use.

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I've some important data to be recovered there. Any help please?

Update - Attaching couple more pictures. One is of the expanded Disk Drives label.

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A bit of a background too - When the Desktop was assembled long ago, it only had 80 GB storage. Few years ago, I had installed another 1TB drive.

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  • What are these drives? does they exist really? or you simply are unhappy that there is a hole in letters sequence? Maybe there is a card reader in your system, and you set "Hide empty drives in My computer"? Try reassigning drive letters to the ones you want (except C: !!!) - if they are busy, you will not be able to do it. PS. Show Device manager screenshot (view as Devices - By attach, expand all drive nodes).
    – Akina
    Commented Oct 8, 2019 at 6:25
  • Assuming the missing partitions are separate physical drives, do they still show up in your BIOS?
    – MMM
    Commented Oct 8, 2019 at 6:31
  • In your second picture can you click "Device manager" and then expand the item labelled "Disk drives". Take a screenshot of the expanded device manager and post it here. This will show any hard drives installed on your system that Windows has identified as being present. Although this isn't a resolution, it will enable us to provide better quality answers. Also, as MMM has suggested, check your BIOS to make sure the hard disk the data is stored on is actually seen by the BIOS
    – Kinnectus
    Commented Oct 8, 2019 at 7:33
  • @Kinnectus - Check the update now.
    – Sagar Raj
    Commented Oct 9, 2019 at 16:48
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    @wrecclesham, it NOW makes sense that the missing drives are because the old disk no longer shows in the BIOS. The question didn't have any information relating to the 80GB disk background until today. Your comment now makes sense and can probably be a suitable answer for the OP.
    – Kinnectus
    Commented Oct 9, 2019 at 20:10

1 Answer 1

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The D, E, F and G drives are all partitions on the same 80 GB HDD. A recent catastrophic failure of the 80 GB drive or loose cable connection has caused the smaller hard drive to fail to appear anywhere in the system, including in the BIOS.

Such a low-level problem would have nothing to do with Windows itself.

There are only really two possibilities at this point:

  1. Total failure of the 80 GB HDD.
  2. Loose connection to the 80 HDD (either of the power or data cable) or something that could have an equivalent effect, such as a defective cable.

Process of elimination:

If the 80 GB drive is also SATA, try unplugging the power and SATA cables from both the 1 TB drive and the 80 GB drive and swapping them over, as both the power and SATA cables, as well as the corresponding SATA port on your motherboard, are already confirmed to be working with the 1 TB drive. Leave the other ends of all of the power and data cables connected exactly where they are on the motherboard as you only want to change one thing at a time. If the 80 GB drive is IDE and not SATA, and so can't be swapped with the larger drive, try simply unplugging and reconnecting both ends of the IDE cable, to attempt to resolve a loose connection.

Swapping the cables over would tell you straight away if there is a problem with any cables, as such a problem would follow the bad cable to the known good 1 TB drive. Swapping the cable connections over will also tell you immediately if the 80 GB drive is still functional, as it will end up connected to known good cables.

If, after swapping the cables over, the 80 GB drive still fails to appear and the 1 TB drive still works normally, it would be almost certain that the 80 GB drive itself had failed.

So hopefully the problem does follow the cables instead!

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