Hard Drive MIA - any ideas?

[Endymion]

I had a 2nd 120GB kicking around, so I finally got around to putting it in. I took out the old 12GB I had been using for my OS, and made the new 120 my primary drive. I left the other 120GB I had in there to be the slave drive and booted up. The new 120 made some funky noises (it was not brand new) so I took it out and went back to the old setup. For some reason, Windows now cannot access the 120GB drive that I had in there all along. Disk Management in mmc shows it as 'unreadable' and Windows gives an error when you click on it. Nothing was done to this drive, so I have no idea what happened. Running XP, ntfs on the 120GB drive - does anyone have any ideas on how I can get this drive back without wiping it clean?

 

[1sikbITCH]

If your 120 gig is a dynamic drive, it needs the original windows installation to read it. The same thing happened to me when I switched out harddrives, but when I put the original drive back in and booted to it, I was then able to see the other drive again.

If you have already wiped and reinstalled windows on your 12 gig, and your 120 gig is a dynamic volume, you might be SOL.

 

[Endymion]

Yeah, I put the drive with the OS on it right afterwards and have not been able to see the drive since.


Disk Management shows the disk as unreadable

Explorer shows D:\ is not Accessible. The parameter is incorrect.

File system shows up as RAW


I have tried everything I can think of, does anyone else have any ideas?

 

[MichaelD]

I'll throw this out there b/c it happened to me very recently and is similar to your situation.

My main rig (gaming box) used to belong to my domain. Little network I run at home just to stay current on W2K Server. Anyway.

After said main rig sitting in storage for 5 months, I take it out, boot it up. It boots great. Disjoined it from the domain and rebooted.

Upon reboot, it got to the desktop, but I couldn't access two of the four partitions. Disk Manager said "unreadable format." I KNOW they are NTFS...I built the stupid thing.

After much head scratching and trying crap out, I right click on the mystery partitions and hit Properties/Security. The security key had become corrupted. Instead of only having my Administrative login account listed, it had a string of alphanumeric crap.

I added "Everyone", deleted that alpha crap and BAM! Partiiton is back and healthy, etc. I have no idea why it did this, since the other two partitions were fine. You might want to check it out...you never know.

 

[MrCodeDude]

Might also try Active Partition Recovery (google it; it's a program) to see if it can recognize the files on your spare drive.

 

[Endymion]

I am gonna give that one a try, I have 3 others here that I am going to try as well - there is one that charges by the GB - it would cost $644 to retrieve all the data on the drive!


I think I will pass on that one!