Multiple drives, after a reformat can't access one of them.

[surreal1221]

Got an unmountable_boot_volume this morning, made an attempt to troubleshoot it and finally broke down and reformatted.

The previous drive set up was like this.

Two drives, one 60gig and one 320gig.

The 60gig was partitioned into two particians, C and D.

C was 10 gig, and housed a couple games.
D was 50 gig, and housed the operating system.

The 320gig had a single partition and house music, videos, movies, documents, etc. Essentially everything that I wanted to protect in the event of a lose of the Operating System, and a reformat.

That's the overview.

This morning I deleted the C and D partitions, and then created one single partition (C). Format C, then install XP Pro.

The install goes fine, and now I'm back and operating. Unfortunately, the 320gig is listed (D), but no size or any other information is available via Properties. I try to open it, and I get a prompt telling me that it needs to be formatted.

Now, if I format it. . .all data will be lost. I want to avoid that at all cost.

I have yet to install any XP service packs, SP2 is downloading right now though and will install that shortly.

So - does anyone have any suggestions? I'm sure I'm not the only person to have done this, and there must be a way to get my data back.

Thanks

 

[surreal1221]

Nevermind.

Installed XP SP2 and it is displayed properly, and the data is there. Interesting.

 

[bruceb]

Not too interesting as XP pre SP1 could not see large hard drives, since the 48 bit LBA in software was not in XP
before SP1 was installed. Without 48 bit LBA you can't see more than 137Gb drive size.