Notpron Forums

Sorry. For some reason I was under the impression it worked in safe mode. Dunno where that came from.

What interface/s are your drives using? IDE? SATA?

You could try playing with some of the BIOS's settings. Maybe XP is balking at something in there.

IDE
but when I put in a SATA harddisk, it wasnt showing either. it's got nothing to do with that....you know the mounted drive acts like the others too.

Just want to have a clear picture in my head.

Try starting XP with the /SOS switch. You might spot something during boot.

Could you try formatting another drive as the boot drive, removing all other hard disks and booting off it?

if you enlighten me about the sos switch!? never heard of it

Set it in MSConfig under the boot.ini tab.

it checked the disk on boot....but nothing special

Try disabling LBA mode (large disk support. Whatever your BIOS may call it) in the BIOS. It could be that the disks have been formatted with LBA support disabled. XP might ignore the drives if it's set incorrectly.

formating a mounted drive?
it wouldnt make sense if that was the problem

Humour me. I'm grasping I'll admit.

Installing XP on a different drive and booting off it as C: would rule out a lot.

its just all drives except C: and A: being hidden in some way...no matter what it is...mounted, dvd, hd (sata/ide)

i dunno exactly when it started, because only a while later i noticed that the dvd drive is missing

DVD as well? Arrg. I'd say they were hidden but then they'd still show up in disk management. Got any restore points you could try?

I guess it's got to be software if they're showing on a boot cd (linux?). A driver may have added itself to safe mode as well. Hell, you may even have a root kit (not a very good one if most of your drives disappear though xD).

should be very long ago
i first noticed the problem in april or something
i'll check

a fuck. cuz of some virus i disabled it long ago, so there is no restore point :s

i should try the windows repair feature...if i knew how it worked

Insert XP disk. Boot off it. Start Windows setup (not the recovery console!). Select your Windows installation. Press R. If the repair option isn't available just exit.

Be sure to back everything up first.

What anti-virus are you running? You might want to check out the Kaspersky and NOD32 trials if you haven't already(obviously not at the same time xD). You never know, they may find something.

RootkitRevealer would expose your basic rootkit.

Of course you could always give up and reinstall from scratch. I'm sure you're trying to avoid that though.

friend had a similar prob recently, reinstalled his mobo drivers with new the latest drivers and it fixed it. dunno if its the same sort of thing.

apart from that, format will work 99% of the time