[SOLVED] Secondary partition not showing up after reinstalling Windows 7

[rajkovic.petar2000]

A friend recently brought in an old Fujitsu laptop and asked me to reinstall the OS on it and moved all his data to partition D on the same hard drive. He had Windows 7 but wanted me to try installing Windows 10, but because the specs weren’t really that good I decided to just go with Windows 7. After formatting the primary partition (C) in the install setup, I installed Windows 7 on it. The laptop booted up, but when I opened up Windows Explorer there was no secondary partition (D) showing up, just the one Windows was installed on. I went into the setup again to see if I accidentally deleted the partition, but it was still there with the same ammount of data on it and it was labeled “System”. Is there any way to try and get the data on this partition back?

 

[USAFRet]

Screencap of your Disk Management window, please.
But, this is specifically what backups are for. Data off on some other physical drive.

 

[geofelt]

My suggestion is to remove the hdd replace the hdd with a ssd and install windows on that. To retrieve the data on the HDD, attach it to the laptop with a usb to sata adapter cable. You can then copy whatever you want back to the ssd,

Believe me, the laptop performance will be transformed with a ssd.

 

[rajkovic.petar2000]

Screencap of your Disk Management window, please.
But, this is specifically what backups are for. Data off on some other physical drive.

Thank you for the quick reply, I was only just able to use the laptop again in the morning, and I managed to make it work. The problem was just a rookie mistake, the second partition didn’t have D as the assigned letter, but was rather named “D”. I noticed that in Disk Management and just assigned a letter to it and now it works and all the files are accessible. Thank you so much! If you hadn’t mentioned Disk Management I probably wouldn’t have even looked there.

 

[rajkovic.petar2000]

My suggestion is to remove the hdd replace the hdd with a ssd and install windows on that. To retrieve the data on the HDD, attach it to the laptop with a usb to sata adapter cable. You can then copy whatever you want back to the ssd,

Believe me, the laptop performance will be transformed with a ssd.

That is exactly what I have on my personal laptop and it’s an absolute life saver. This however isn’t my laptop, it belongs to my friend and he didn’t want me to install an SSD in it since it’s pretty old anyway. Thanks for the suggestion anyway though!

 

[geofelt]

friend does not know what he is missing without a ssd.
Now that you have a working HDD, the conversion is trivial.