One of my drives won't show up

I have a pc with two operating systems on two separate drives, C drive has Win7 and D has Winxp. I can boot to either drive. In addition I have two dvdr drives E and F and Two more drives after that, Each of those drives has a partition bisecting it resulting in G/H and I/J. They are for games/movies and Stuff/backups respectively.

Recently I had to take out a SATA2 cable from the I/J drive and put it into another hard drive because I was backint up to an external drive. When I was done and put the sata cable back the entire drive wasn't recognized. After several reboots I got Backups to show up but not the Stuff partition.

I tried running a chkdisk when I did this I got an error saying they couldn't recognize the drive. I tried running recuva, the paid version and when I ran the wizard it said "path did not exist"

lWhen I went on to where it said "piriform recuva and entered the bad drive letter from browse it selected it but after several hours I got no files. I selected all files.

However I tried it again and selected pictures and I got some pictures.

I also ran chkdsk from the Command Prompt and Windws wasn't able to access the drive but it was able to access all the other drives.

I looked for the bad drive in Administrative Tools> Storage etc and it came up as RAW.

The drive shows up as K, Not K: Stuff. No other informatin is present. I try to open it and it won't open.

What do I do?

Hello Hulk - Just to understand it clearly - You originally had the partition for Stuff labeled as I: drive, and I presume it was formatted as NTFS. Now it is recognized as K: drive and is RAW - an active partition that is unformatted, or the format is not recognized by Windows.

When you disconnected the original drive, in a power off state I assume, on re-start Windows would assume that I: and J: are up for grabs, and would have assigned the letter I: to the external drive when it was detected. For some reason Windows may have retained that letter after you disconnected it. If that is the case, it would have assigned J: and K: to the original drive's two partitions when you plugged it back in. That is why K: is not recognized as a valid partition, it was never an established path in the first place.

You could try opening Computer Management>Storage>Disk Management, find the two partitions in question, right click them, and apply the original drive letters I: and J: to their respective partitions. Do not format either one when asked to do so. That would re-establish the original paths. As far as the RAW designation, I'm not sure what will happen, whether it will go away or not. At this point you can only cross your fingers and hope for the best.

Take and attach to next reply a screen shot showing all the details the Disk Management can display of all your drives.

Pictures are better than words, and give a better and easier understanding of the situation.