Hard Drive offline - Lost?

ok.. i have a C: (main drive) and a F: drive which is my 80 GB hard drive that i had before as well.. now my C: drive went bonkers so i used the campaq system recovery.. adn now it has a hard time finding my F: drive.. it didnt find it at first and wanted to format it.. then just out of hte blue. it ofund it and i was able to go threw all my stuff on there.. and then i restarted it and bam.. its gone again. and i have no idea how to get it back.. i haev to figure out how to get this information on this before i format it cause it has alot of archived files and stuff that i havent backed up. any help would be nice..

its a Maxtor 6Y08L0 hard drive 80 GB and it is running on windows XP on my Compaq persario system. i haev tried to go to the managment area and partitions and stuff but still... nothing is working..

if someone could help me out that owuld be great...
if you could email me at makemesad20@yahoo.ca and help me out or have any suggestions.. please.. that would be greatly appreciated.

thakns

doug

Is your hard drive properly set up in the BIOS? Try setting all of your IDE channels to "Auto."

Also are both drives formatted NTFS? When you restored you C: did you do it as NTFS or FAT32?

hmmm.. ok.. first.. im not sure how to set them to auto.. would you be able to explain?

and also.. they wree both NTFS - when i did the recovery... the C; drive was NTFS and it works fine but im not too sure about the other drive.. in disk managment.. it comnes up as nothing.. just a blank - under the NTFS or FAT32 --- what is weird is in the lats day.. it was fine for about four hours... and then i restarted and now its doing the same thing as just after i recovered the C: drive.

thanks guys. i appreciate your time and effort.. i hope we can get this fixed.