Problem with Hard Drive

toastybaineytoastybainey
edited January 2009 in Hardware
Hi
This may be kind of confusing so I am sorry!

I just bought a new hard drive because I thought my old one broke. It started making scratching noises and Windows would not load, so I thought the hand on it broke.

I did get it started and it kept making really bad noises. I got it started long enough to get some of my files for school off of there and shut it off :)

So I installed my new hard drive and installed windows. I also have a third hard drive, and it has just my files on it, most of them, and that one is newer, got it about 3 months ago where the old hard drive was 4 years old (so I was expecting it to break), and when I hook up the hard drive with my files on it, the one that I bought 3 months ago, windows will install it, and will read it as a hard drive and install drivers, but then it never assigns it a letter, and so I can't access it. I can't get any of my files off of there. So I thought maybe I had the wrong hard drive and that was the broken one, and tried the other one, and it installed that one, assigned it a letter E:\ and worked 100%.

I went to device manager thinking maybe the drivers were not installed correctly. It says it is fine and everything is working properly.

So then I thought, maybe it wasn't the 4 year old hard drive that was broken, maybe it was the 3 month old one, but then why would Windows not load? Because if the slave drive was broken, wouldn't it just not read it and go on with life? So I wanted to do a disk scan, but it wont assign it a letter, so I can't tell.

If it helps any, they are all Western Digital SATA hard drives, and I replaced the cables and it still wont work. They are all formatted in NTFS. And I had scanned them for viruses a billion times, though I don't know if a virus would do this.

Does anyone have any idea what might be wrong?

Thanks :)

Comments

  • Mt_GoatMt_Goat Head Cheezy Knob Pflugerville (north of Austin) Icrontian
    edited January 2009
    Thread was moved to get better attention for the specific problem.
  • Mt_GoatMt_Goat Head Cheezy Knob Pflugerville (north of Austin) Icrontian
    edited January 2009
    Go to start menu, right click on My Computer, select Manage from thr dropdown list, then click storage and finally click on Disk Management. At that poin you should get a prompt to initalize a new drive. Follow that but do not create or format a new partition and do not convert the drive. After that all should be well.
  • toastybaineytoastybainey
    edited January 2009
    it does not give the option unfortunately.
    instead I can click it in the bottom and it has a little warning or alert symbol next to it
    It says below that:
    dynamic

    foreign

    if I right click it gives option to
    import foreign disk
    or convert to basic disk
  • toastybaineytoastybainey
    edited January 2009
    Oh microsoft's site says to import foregin disk and if I hit convert to basic disk, it will destroy the data. I want to make sure that is the right option please
  • toastybaineytoastybainey
    edited January 2009
    Actually I just did it anyway because it's microsoft's website and not some little kid's, and it worked just fine. THANK YOU SO MUCH! I was so worried I lost all my photos and stuff :)
  • Mt_GoatMt_Goat Head Cheezy Knob Pflugerville (north of Austin) Icrontian
    edited January 2009
    Good to hear.

    Welcome to Icrontic! We are a big happy family. ;)
  • toastybaineytoastybainey
    edited January 2009
    No that was the only disk listed dynamic. Yeah. I have no idea why it did that I am trying to think of why now.
  • toastybaineytoastybainey
    edited January 2009
    Could I have converted to dynamic without have intentionally doing it?
  • toastybaineytoastybainey
    edited January 2009
    I just read that a foreign disk is where it uses more than one hard drive to read it as one hard drive.
    I don't know.. I give up. Haha :)
  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited January 2009
    Yeah a what dynamic disk does is read both drives as one drive letter and it's really not recommend to be used. It can lead to lots of problems.
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