Hidden disk drive?

[dbuelke]

Thanks for all the advice on configuring the hard drive portable I scavenged from my DirecTV tuner. I'm sorry, but I threw the rest of that system away and can't recall the model from which I extracted the hard disk, but it was an 80 GB IDE Western Digital. After repartitioning as the dock's instructions directed, it went to work.

It worked successfully to back up my 60GB laptop, so I went to my old computer that my wife uses which showed it had 22 GB on drive C and I proceeded to try to back that up as well. The only other drives that show on My Computer are for the various storage devices such as A, D, and S (ZIP disk). However, after starting the backup process (Windows XP standard backup) it showed there was 52GB of info to back up. I then recalled that a technician scavenged a hard drive from an old business computer I was scrapping and I had him install it into this system a few years ago, but it doesn't show as a listed drive. However, apparently the backup program recognizes it and tried to back up whatever info was left on it. How can I identify this disk if it doesn't list on My Computer? By the way, is a 49 out of 52 GB backup of any value, or are they all-or-none?

Thanks.
Don

[cauzomb]

Sometimes companies like HP or others may have all the factory spec OS and system files pre-loaded into a hidden section of the hard drive, for repair purposes.. When the user has issues with the system, beyond a simple fix, they format the messed up section then run the inbuilt recovery/restoration and it's back to factory specs. You may be finding that partition with your backup software. Ah, only 80GB, first post it says 800GB, I was gonna go looking through the classifieds for the model I can only find DTV/TIVO models with max 250GB, but the price for them/even used are more than a cheap 250GB drive NIB.