Attaching "old" D drive in XP?

[rkoenn]

I just installed a clean install of XP home edition on a friends computer. The configuration is a 20 GB drive as C and a 40 GB drive as D. Before the new OS install, the system was operating with Win2K but was very unstable. So I reformatted the C drive and did the clean XP Home install. I did not touch the D drive, which was loaded to the brim with MP3s, pics, etc. The install was absolutely smooth and the system started up perfectly. However, the D drive is not accesible at the moment. Disk administrator sees the drive and apparently has reserved a D drive letter for it, but it only shows up under disk administrator and it does not correctly identify it as having data. I can "attach" it to the system but it says if I do, all data will be lost, even though it doesn't seem to recognize any data. I need to "recover" this drive and assumed it would be accessible under XP with no additional work. Is it because I went from 2K to XP home and not professional? If I put it in a XP Pro system should I be able to access the data on the drive? Is there anything else I am overlooking in getting access to this drive? If I can get to the data, I can dump it to another drive and then reformat and move it back to the existing drive, either in the box or over a network. Any and all suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

 

[DaiShan]

is there an os installed on the 40 gb?

 

[Turkey22]

When you installed XP did you set it to NTFS? I think it asks you. If you did fat32 then you could try to convert the c: to ntfs, just a guess.

 

[bsobel]

In disk administrator is their in 'import foreign disk' option showing for the drive?
Bill

 

[rkoenn]

Problem fixed for those interested. When that drive was installed in the original 2K machine, it apparently was not installed as a "basic" drive. I took the drive out of the Win XP Home machine and attached it to my XP Pro machine. I was then able to "Import a foreign drive" into my XP Pro system and it could see the drive fine. I then wondered if it had done anything physical to the drive format and put it back in the XP Home machine. Still nothing in this machine and of course I was not going to bring it in as a basic drive. I then popped it back into my Pro system and copied all 39 GBs into my machine. I popped it back into the Home machine and brought it into the system. Sure enough, per the warning, all the data was lost. I then formatted it with NTFS and it appeared fine as the D drive in the system. Finally copied all the music files over the network. Would have been better off doing that installed in my machine again. Took about 9 hours over 10 base ethernet. But I could use my system while it was doing it. So, XP Pro has more capabilities to "mess" with things than Home. Would have been dead in the water if I hadn't had a Pro machine available. Remember this too if you are installing new drives in your systems.