I have windows xp, with two sata2 hard drives installed, one contains
recovery and operating system(seagate ST3160812AS) and the other(Samsung HD160JJ )for backup/data storage. until recently both these worked fine.
however now when i boot my pc it sees the backup hdd(samsung) in BIOS, but when it boots it takes about 10minutes to clear the windows logo screen and the drive is not seen by Explorer or any other program including system devices or disk manager. ran SMARTcheck from BIOS but this proved ok. i tried safe mode and all the drives showed up and worked fine, i tried restore but it was blank and had no restore points. ran the testdisk program ( as suggested in the sticky ) in safe mode but it showed the samsung drive as ok, it couldn't find it in normal mode.
i think i made a booboo by downloading some awful program (tweakxp i think it was)
however this also roughly coincided with an upgrade from avg 7.5-to avg8. so i',m not sure.
PS. could this be related to a previous posting I made here :
http://www.techsupportforum.com/f10/wmp-crashes-when-mp3-players-connect-248843.html
which was unresolved?
please help me get it back. surely it's something simple.
