Need some hard drive help - drive is there with data but can't see anything?

[Lcarvone]

I have a old WD 10.2 gig hard drive that was replaced with a new 80 gig drive. The 10 was partitioned (C: and D: drives) and had about 6 gigs of stuff on it. Well, something funky must have happened when I was using the 80 gig's included software to copy the C drive from the 10 to the 80. The copy didn't work and I ended up just installing a fresh OS on the 80 and removed the 10 from the computer completely. This was all under Win98SE with FAT32 partitions.

So now I took the 10 and put it as a second drive in another computer running WinXP Home. The drive is installed and is reported as working properly. "Properties" shows it has the 6 gigs of data on it as before but nothing appears. I can't explore, a search shows nothing, etc. The files are there but I can't see or access them.

Any thoughts?

Side note----- At one point it was a primary drive (or at least the C: partition was) so maybe this has something to do with it? The D: partition with just files and no OS should be showing up at least.....

 

[Lcarvone]

bump

 

[Lcarvone]

bump

 

[Lcarvone]

Anyone with some ideas???

 

[Mik3y]

did u make sure the jumpers are set correctly for the secondary drive?

 

[Lcarvone]

Yeah. I tried both the cable select route and master/slave setup - both with each drive taking turns. No combination allows me to "see" the data

 

[AWhackWhiteBoy]

scandisk is your friend

 

[Jackal1975]

Right click on My Computer.
Select Manage.
Go to Disk Management , under Storage.
Your second hard drive should be listed as Disk1.
Right click on the small box that has the little disk icon on it.
Select Import Foreign Disks.

It takes a split second and you have your hd back.

 

[Lcarvone]

Well I don't have the import foreign disk option at least as far as ai can see. It is showing the drive as a primary partition and all is OK with it according to Windows. ran disk checking with no help.

 

[Jackal1975]

As a last resort you could use Partition Magic for resizing partitions, converting them to NTFS, or changing the drive letters if PM still sees them as C:,D: on the old one, in an effort to get Windows to take notice of the drive.

 

[Lcarvone]

Well, in terms of noticing the drive Windows sees it fine. The size and available space are right. It shows that the disk is working properly and everthing. Just when I choose explore I get nothing even though it shows as half full....

 

[AWhackWhiteBoy]

did you run scandisk yet? i had the exact same problem a few weeks ago. scandisk re-tagged all the files and set everything straight. its an extremely powerful too.

 

[Lcarvone]

If Scandisk like on Win98 is the same as "Error checking" in WinXP then yes I have run it on two occasions.

 

[Lcarvone]

Another question....will Partition Magic allow me to change it from a Primary to Logical drivewithout loosing any data? Right now WinXP is showing the following (C, D, and E are on a separate 30 gig drive ; G is the 10 gig in question) under Disk Management:

C: Healthy (System) - Primary partition
D: Healthy - Logical drive
E: Healthy - Logical drive

G: Healthy (Active) -Primary partition

 

[Jackal1975]

That's something I've never attempted yet. IIRC, it should still be usable as a secondary HD even if it is partitioned with the special sectors for a primary partition.

The only other thing I can think of to suggest, is that you somehow "acquire" a program like GetBackData for FAT or GetBackData for NTFS , which do raw disk sector reading that bypasses the ordinary windows access. I know of a few people that have recovered many GB of data that they thought was gone for good.

Good Luck.

- Jackal