Slave Harddrive no longer accessible in Windows

PhilH930

Junior Member
Nov 5, 2006
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My computer set up for the past 2 years has not changed, and is:

AMD 64 3200+, 2Gb DDR, Asus K8N-E Del, Primary HD 80Gb Western Digital, Slave HD 160Gb Western Digtal (model number WD1600JD).

I use my primary harddrive for windows, and the slave for my documents (currently about 60gb worth over 6 years).

The problem is on my slave harddrive, the WD1600JD. Both drives connect through sata and have never had any problems to date.

Today, my slave drive would not open when in windows. The drive shows in the BIOS, in the device manager and even shows in 'My Computer', however when I try and access the drive the following message appears:

D:\ is not accessible
The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.

I have taken the following steps:

- Dis-connected all cables to the drive and reconnected
- Uninstalled drive and restarted windows
- Taken drive out and tried to load on a different computer
- Ran Western Digital diagnostic software which the drive has passed

Still, the drive can not be accessed through windows. I am beginning to fear the worst, as in disk management it is showing my drive to be 100% free, which is not the case as I know I had over 60gb on there.

The only thing that has changed over the last week is access to the drive through my Xbox360. I updated the PC to Windows Media Player 11 and the Xbox 360 shared the relative documents, for one day, until they could no longer access this. Now, the only thing that came to mind is something to do with the sharing rights of the drive has triggered it to become inactive as maybe it considers the Xbox360 a risk to share with. However, this is unlikely. As I said, the problem came about today when the drive could suddenly no longer be accessed through windows.

Please, can anyone help me try and salvage data if not the drive. I am about out of ideas of what to do.
 

PhilH930

Junior Member
Nov 5, 2006
9
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The drive had the same issues on the other PC. It was recognized in the BIOS, and showed up in Windows as a drive on 'My Computer' but could not be accessed, or defragged or anything. Disk Management showed it to be 100% free.
 

PhilH930

Junior Member
Nov 5, 2006
9
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0
I must also add that the following steps shows the drive as RAW, rather than NTFS:

Go to "My Computer" and right click on the drives icon and then on Properties and take a look at the File System of the drive. It should be NTFS, but it might be RAW.

I am guessing RAW is bad.
 

Bozo Galora

Diamond Member
Oct 28, 1999
7,271
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First, let me compliment you on your clear concise statement of your problem. Highly unusual - lol

"I'm guessing RAW is bad" - heh

What happened was that I assume you had NTFS on the data drive and tried to transfer between that and the xbox which obviously has no NTFS. It uses FATX.
Quote:
FATX filesystem
http://www.xbox-linux.org/wiki/Porting_an_Operating_System_to_the_Xbox_HOWTO

On the hard disk, the Xbox exclusively uses the FATX filesystem, which is a simplified version of FAT16/FAT32. The articles Xbox Partitioning and Filesystem Details and Differences between Xbox FATX and MS-DOS FAT explain FATX in detail.
(Unquote)

Also......
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/13/xbox_360_file-system_cracked/

So the HDD went "raw" or just bits and bytes - no file table, and possibly incorrect (not "corrupted") MBR. It may have kicked down to FAT32 or FAT16, which you cannot read from original NTFS O/S drive.
This is not as bad as it sounds, because it was not caused by a powerfailure, or drive failure etc.
Normally I would say try the drive with a win 98 install on your first drive. This would mean formatting out your XP install and installing win 98 there instead as FAT 16 (same size) partition. Partition Magic can do this easily, if your O/S partition is too big for DOS
(using win98 setup floppy format command).
Of course, one should NOT resize move or create anything!!!
Or I could use ptedit (partition table edit) to change data drive File system back to NTFS
However you have vital data (of course) on the second drive, so we dont want to do anything dangerous.
So I would not do the latter in this case - 6 years of work not backed up.
There is a program that is good for this, and PROBABLY safe for this situation
http://www.z-a-recovery.com/art-raw-filesystem.htm

HOWEVER, the very safest thing to use (try) is GetDataBack 3.01, it will be very slow in trial mode, but you will at least know if it goes.
http://www.runtime.org/