A hard disk is part of a unit that stores and provides relatively quick access to large amounts of data. These days, the computers usually come with a hard disk that contains several gigabytes of storage. However, if you want to upgrade your system by adding another hard disk to it you can surely do it. In that case, the new hard disk will be made the primary hard disk whereas the older one will be the secondary hard disk. This process is known as “slaving” and the slaved hard disk is usually used for data backup purposes. However, sometimes it may happen that when you do slave the secondary hard disk, the primary hard disk becomes inaccessible. This issue can be addressed by using a partition recovery software.

Consider a scenario wherein you want to upgrade from a 40 GB hard disk to a 160 GB hard disk. You swapped the disks and attached the 160 GB disk. You made 3 partitions in the new hard disk. Now, you want to attach the older hard disk to use it as a slave hard disk for data backup purposes. After attaching the secondary hard disk, you are not able to view the primary hard disk in the BIOS.

Cause: The file system of the primary hard disk may have corrupted badly and the hard disk partitions can not be accessed.

Resolution:

Try to detach the secondary hard disk and see if the system is running properly. If the problem persists, connect the primary hard disk to a working system having same operating system. Here, the drive may not be visible in My Computer but will be visible in Disk Management option in Administrative Tools. You should try to run chkdsk to repair any type of damage in the hard disk. If the file system is not damaged, chkdsk would scan the hard disk successfully and it may resolve the issue. But if the file system is corrupt, then you will get the following error message: "No partition is bootable."

After getting this error message, it becomes clear that the partition is corrupt and you will have to use partition recovery software. These tools use complex scanning algorithms to scan the hard disk and recover all the inaccessible partitions. These highly user interactive tools are read-only in nature and do not require having any prior technical knowledge.

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is an efficient partition recovery tool that repairs and recovers the lost data in the hard disk partition. It recovers from FAT 32, VFAT, NTFS, NTFS5 partitions. It is compatible with Windows 7, Vista, XP, 2003, and 2000.