Hard drive is unrecognizable after reinstalling windows

[aakerman]

I've bought a new hard drive, and installed windows 7 on it. I had two hard drives previously, so that makes three total now. The two old ones are 320gb and 250gb western digital.

The 320 works fine, has worked since booting up for the first time. But the second one won't work. When I go into disk management, it says "dynamic, foreign". I try to import it, but windows gives me this error: "The pack name is invalid".

I googled this error, and found only one post - where no one had been able to solve the issue.

I've played around with jumpers and cables, but the error persists each time. Any ideas?

 

[taltamir]

http://www.petri.co.il/differe...ndows_xp_2000_2003.htm

you need to get back to previous OS, back up your data on that disk. then change it to a BASIC disk, reformat it, put the data back on it... then you can safely migrate to different operating systems.

As for win7 lack of support on google... win7 is not even up for SALE yet... there are a few ways of getting it:
1. be a business that sells computer that got a version to test on their systems early.
2. Be a member of the microsoft development network
3. Piracy

As such there has not been enough time to develop a sufficient database of questions and answers.

Specifically to your problem... i think the issue is that windows 7 uses a DIFFERENT method of storing data in dynamic disks than your old OS... it still probably supports them, just in a new format. You should never have converted that disk into a dynamic disk to begin with, and it would have probably given you trouble regardless of which OS you changed to.

 

[taltamir]

PS, you can also take the approach of deleting everything on the drive... that will make it useable right away.

 

[aakerman]

Thanks for the comprehensive answer. I neglected to mention that my previous OS was Windows 7 as well (beta - has been available for all . And the hard drive ran fine. So it wouldn't help going back to previous OS!

The other guy who had this problem, ran Vista. So it's not native to 7.

 

[aakerman]

Yes I could format it, but it contains (of course) something very valuable that I haven't backed up.

 

[AsianriceX]

*** WARNING ***
These methods require low level hex editing, so it definitely has the potential to screw you even further. Try this out at your own risk!

http://windows7forums.com/wind...amic-disk-invalid.html
http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=191006

 

[yinan]

Can you boot into WindowsPE and look at it?

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: aakerman
Thanks for the comprehensive answer. I neglected to mention that my previous OS was Windows 7 as well (beta - has been available for all . And the hard drive ran fine. So it wouldn't help going back to previous OS!

The other guy who had this problem, ran Vista. So it's not native to 7.

the current OS, windows 7 final, is installed on a brand new drive. You still have the two older drives and you have NOT Formatted them... (please correct me if I am wrong about this)

unless you specifically deleted the PARTITION that contained the old install on one of the previous two drives, or formatted one of them, or it was the drive you can see and you went ahead and deleted all the files from it manually, than it still contains your old windows 7 installation and can be booted into with a bit of work.