Hard drive information retrieval problem

Sup all, it's been a canny while since ive floated around these parts, hope all is well.
Anyway down to the problem, Ive been asked to get some information off of a hard drive but im having problems. Ive done this sort of thing before and it's been no problem. Anyway the problem that im having is that i can't explore the hard drive. It's in my device manager but i can't find it in 'my computer'. Ive taken the lil black thing off the back of the hard drive that would normally allow me to explore it and turn it into a slave drive but it's still not having it.
Any help would be most appreciated.

Perhaps it's not been assigned a drive letter for some reason? Right-click My Computer -> Manage -> Disk Manager -> right-click the drive -> Change drive letter or access path. You can assign it a letter from there.

It doesn't give me the option to change the letter or the access path. Well saying that it doesn't even have an access path, if it had one of them i would be able to get access to it :p
Cheers for your help though:)

grab an ubuntu Live CD, and boot through it. then plug some USB HDD and backup whatever you need to.
Or use Hiren

Winternals ERD is also top notch, it was my favourite tool of all time when I had to access easily some password/damaged/faulty partitions or HDDs.
Microsoft then bought it and renamed it to this.

That's the thing it's not damaged, at least i don't think it is. It just won't show up in My Computer. Also i should state that the IDE hard drive is running out of my ONLY IDE slot. So i don't have any other dvd drives running.

So you have it set to slave, and it is connected in the slave position of the IDE cable, and it has a master device on the same cable?
Does the drive show up in teh bios? If not, then it will never show in windows.

No it doesn't have any other devices attachted to the IDE cable as far as i know ive setup everything correctly (hardware wise), yerr it's coming up in the bios aswell.

If it's the only device on the cable then put it on the end of the cable and set that jumper to master, or cable select.


edit: I think I misread something. It is showing up in device manager?
What about in disk management?
If it shows there, then next to it do you see any 'volumes' (Partitions)?
If it is showing partitions then right click on one and click assign drive letter

Firstly, glad to see you AD I was actually reading your posts in my Water cooled thread today on the first page from over a year ago. Glad to see you bud.

In disk management you may have to initialize the drive or set the partition to active. I had a problem like this a while back and that worked for me. Also did you try any data recovery software?

It IS showing up in the device manager, but im not sure where to find this disk management, is that in device manager?
Good to see you again Detale, i haven't tried data recovery software because i didn't think it would work if i can't get a pathway to it.