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slave hard drive needing to be formatted before i can access?

slightlyhuman

slightlyhuman

Lifer
Wow, alright. So, it seems computers seems to still amaze me every day.

Story:

I've finally got sick and *edited by Moderator* tired of the pos OS vista is. I said it was time for a format and revert back to XP. I throw in my xp disk and proceed to booting off of it. I have two hard drives. My Primary is a 160gb HD and a backup 500GB, both SATA. I delete the partition on my primary 160GB drive and install windows on it.

I boot into windows and see both drives showing in my computer. I go to access my backup secondary drive to get all my drivers(which also contains everything I've ever owned on a pc as far as pics, progs, docs, etc.) and it says this tried has not been formatted, do I want to format?

what the --? I never even touched the drive when booting on the xp disk and installing. Why can't I access my back up drive?

fwiw, abit ip35-e mobo, e2140 oc'd 2.8, 2gb ram, etc.

Did I just lose everything??:roll:


This is a tech forum, let's skip the unnecessary obscenities.

AnandTech Moderator
mechBgon
 
Originally posted by: GaryJohnson
Do you have at least service pack 1 for XP installed? There was a HDD size limit pre-SP1.
Click to expand...

thank you for your reply. i will be sure and install sp1 as soon as i get home tonight. hopefully that will fix it. it's been a while since i've had xp installed and when i did use xp i think i had a disk with sp2 already built into it.

will update.
 
Originally posted by: DeePee
Originally posted by: GaryJohnson
Do you have at least service pack 1 for XP installed? There was a HDD size limit pre-SP1.
Click to expand...

thank you for your reply. i will be sure and install sp1 as soon as i get home tonight. hopefully that will fix it. it's been a while since i've had xp installed and when i did use xp i think i had a disk with sp2 already built into it.

will update.
Click to expand...


just tried it, no success.

can anyone else please help?

 
From an Administrator-level account, go Start > Run > compmgmt.msc and Computer Management opens. Go on down to Storage > Disk Management and see what it says about your 500GB drive's status. A screenshot might help too.
 
Originally posted by: mechBgon
From an Administrator-level account, go Start > Run > compmgmt.msc and Computer Management opens. Go on down to Storage > Disk Management and see what it says about your 500GB drive's status. A screenshot might help too.
Click to expand...

i replied in my second post stating i did that and it shows a 'healthy 128gb drive'.

sp2 didn't help. however, i was able to get my data back using a program called testdrive. after i recovered everything i went to format the drive in windows and it said it was unable to format..? so now i'm going to try and format it by booting off my windows cd and going through that.

thanks for the help guys:beer: but any idea why windows couldn't format the drive even after it said it needed to be?



also, sorry for the f-bomb mech:heart:
 
well i tried deleting the 131gb partition in windows setup but it won't allow me to make a partition bigger than 131gb... wtf?

where did my other 300+gigs go?!?
 
alright, somehow or another showed up in disk management this time as 470ish gigs of unallocated space. formatted and it's working.

jesus tap dancing christ what an unexplainable nightmare.

kudos to those who helped:beer:
 
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