Before I go into detail, I want to say that I'm not completely convinced that I understand just what the heck happened, but I do believe it was related to Norton attempting to remove Vundo (virus), and me doing this over a usb->ide cable.

1. In a way overcaffeinated moment, I may have pulled the IDE part off without powering down the drive first.
2. or....the repair of vundo required a reboot, which with my current USB->IDE cable is a no-no and required a power-down.

Having now irritated you all with not enough information, nor a picture of the HDD (Hitachi Deskstar) I want to say the following:

1. The drive answers back to TestDrive as existing, but with no partitions. The drive "answers back" with it's identification properly. (size / CHS / etc.)
2. UCBD4Win's XP (from SP3) application, computer config, has the hard drive listed, but without partition.
3. TestDrive cannot *find* the partitions.

Is there a place for me to start (including supplying you all with all the detail necessary)...I'm gathering it now, but it's not easy for me so this post seemed appropriate as is.

Thanks in advance...

You obviously have access to the bare drive, why not give the model number from its label?

Vundo can't be reliably removed. You must format the partition, reinstall OS, and tell the user to stop being a retard on the internet.

1. Pulling IDE cable off the drive while it's hot is normally no problem. Unless you did it during a writing operation - sometimes this can hang it up and it won't finish the command. When you are inside Windows, you don't know what it's doing.

2. Get rid of the USB adapter for this, it won't help you.

My advice:
Boot computer into MHDD with disk connected to IDE port. Make sure it identifies ok, with same information (model number) on the label.

Use an "fdisk" like program to VIEW partition table. Try this from DOS first.

If partitions are there, move disk to slave position and boot computer into working OS. You're using Windows, so run diskmgmt.msc and see if partitions are recognized.

If partitions are not there, you need to recreate partition table manually without writing anything else to the disk (no formatting, initializing, anything like this.) After you do this, filesystem should be there and you can copy data.

Sensible, but I have since placed the drive back in the machine, and I'm having difficulty getting to it for personal reasons. :-/ But you're right normally.

Precisely my conclusion over time and infact my M.O. as well. I did find one case where Microsoft Live One Care (gasp) did repair it. But this is rare.

Is there a favorite guide of yours for doing this? The partitions are not seen by both the MS disk manager, nor by TestDrive. (both via UBCD4Win's PE version of XP sp3).