Seeing old secondary hard drive under XP

[rkoenn]

I just installed a clean install of XP home edition on a friends computer. The configuration is a 20 GB drive as C and a 40 GB drive as D. Before the new OS install, the system was operating with Win2K but was very unstable. So I reformatted the C drive and did the clean XP Home install. I did not touch the D drive, which was loaded to the brim with MP3s, pics, etc. The install was absolutely smooth and the system started up perfectly. However, the D drive is not accesible at the moment. Disk administrator sees the drive and apparently has reserved a D drive letter for it, but it only shows up under disk administrator and it does not correctly identify it as having data. I can "attach" it to the system but it says if I do, all data will be lost, even though it doesn't seem to recognize any data. I need to "recover" this drive and assumed it would be accessible under XP with no additional work. Is it because I went from 2K to XP home and not professional? If I put it in a XP Pro system should I be able to access the data on the drive? Is there anything else I am overlooking in getting access to this drive? If I can get to the data, I can dump it to another drive and then reformat and move it back to the existing drive, either in the box or over a network. Any and all suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

 

[Slogun]

Well that does seem odd. I pop other hard drives into my WinXP pro machine on occasion no problem.
Make sure you have the jumpers on the hard drive set correctly to slave. I assume this drive was formatted NTFS otherwise you probably wouldn't be having this problem.
Did you try going into Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management?

 

[Force21]

Just a thought.....

When Win2K was setup on that computer, it wasn't using any type of "software" raid or dynamic disk setup was it? If it was you may have a serious problem tyring to recover the data on that secondary drive. I am not real familiar with software raid and exactly how it works, but I am pretty sure if it was setup that way, you probably cannot recover the data on that second drive.

Have you tried installing the drive in another XP or 2K machine to see if it was accesible?

Good luck

Jim

 

[rkoenn]

Problem fixed for those interested. When that drive was installed in the original 2K machine, it apparently was not installed as a "basic" drive. I took the drive out of the Win XP Home machine and attached it to my XP Pro machine. I was then able to "Import a foreign drive" into my XP Pro system and it could see the drive fine. I then wondered if it had done anything physical to the drive format and put it back in the XP Home machine. Still nothing in this machine and of course I was not going to bring it in as a basic drive. I then popped it back into my Pro system and copied all 39 GBs into my machine. I popped it back into the Home machine and brought it into the system. Sure enough, per the warning, all the data was lost. I then formatted it with NTFS and it appeared fine as the D drive in the system. Finally copied all the music files over the network. Would have been better off doing that installed in my machine again. Took about 9 hours over 10 base ethernet. But I could use my system while it was doing it. So, XP Pro has more capabilities to "mess" with things than Home. Would have been dead in the water if I hadn't had a Pro machine available. Remember this too if you are installing new drives in your systems.

 

[Slogun]

Interesting (XP)erience. Glad you got it reconciled.
Thanks for the update.