• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

Harddrive Problem

M

mroptimistic

Senior member
I had my main 250 gig partitioned into 3 partitions. I wiped the main partition to do a fresh install of xp pro. One partition is fine, the other showed as unpartitioned space and I had to format, but luckily I didn't have a lot left on it.

Thats not a big deal, but my main problem is I had a second drive I picked up a few months ago and used for my music collection. 200gig that was formatted and had all my music copied over and was running fine. After I wiped main drive and reinstalled windows in disk management its showing 128 gigs, which is about how much was full with music and it shows as healthy but it doesn't show as formatted. I can't access anything on it and I obviously dont want to format over all my music. I have about all but 20 gigs of it backed up on dvds but I would prefer not to lose that 20 gigs not to mention the time to copy over everything from the dvds.

I have an external enclosure that I was thinking of taking the drive out and popping it in that and connecting it that way but I dont really see how that will change anything.

If anyone has any ideas on what to do it would be greatly appreciated.
 
Did you do an install of XP that had SP1 or higher integrated, or have you installed SP1 or SP2 yet? XP without SP1 does not recognize drives larger than 127GB(ish), even if the IDE controller does.

If you must, you can download recovery tools that ought to easily be able to copy off all the data, since technically it's not unformatted.
 
Have seen this problem before with a client's external USB enclosure. In this case, the disk suddenly started showing as unformatted in the management console and the data was inaccessible.

Right click on My Computer and select Manage to bring up the Management console and select disk management to show all your disks.

A free utility, Testdisk was able to find the partition and work it's magic with no difficulty.

TD

I still don't know what caused the problem . maybe pulling the plug without having the drive optimized for Quick Removal?
 
Thanks for the tips, original xp install i wasn't paying attention and used my base xp with no sp's, i reinstalled with xp w/ sp2. Testdisk through analysis can see the partitions on the second drive and I can see every file thats on there, but I can't figure out how to make it fix it so the pc sees it as working.

Thanks again for the advice, at least I know the data is still on there.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top