Hey,
i just re-installed XP, and now my VERY IMPORTANT HARD DRIVE (d) is not working properly. XP sees it as unformatted "RAW" disk reporting only 32 GB (31.5GB)
I doubt anyone will be able to help you. Need to post some info first. Your hardware configuration, etc. More info you post, higher probability that someone on Icrontic Forums might know what the hell happened.
I don't know if this is what the original poster was talking about, but it sounds similar. He is my problem:
I have a pc with two slots for hard drives, and I had a 120 and a 80 gb in there. I bought a 200 gb last weekend, so I disconnected my dvd burner and hooked up this 200 gb, formatted the 200gb, and then moved all the files from my 80 gb to the 200 gb. Then, I went back and took out my 80 gb and installed my 200 gb instead of it, and put back my dvd burner. Now when I start up XP, the drive is not recognized as a formatted drive with files in it. Instead, XP recognizes it as a raw unformatted 31.5 gb hard drive. The bios recognizes the hard drive, and device manager etc can see it. Maxtor has a program it sends with their hard drives, an installation program, so I tried installing that and seeing if it can troubleshoot. When I asked the program to reformat the 200 gb, it told me there are other files on the drive I will lose after the format, so I know the files aren't lost.
Therefore, does anyone know what I can do? My biggest problem is the fact that I deleted all the files from my 80 gb, before testing my 200gb, which is foolish, but hindsight doesn't help me here.
Any and all help is appreciated.
Well thats interesting. Whatever you do, do not format/erase your data from the drive. Get a program like GHOST or Driveimage and make a backup of the entire HDD if you can. There has got to be something we can do as the data is not gone, just some parition info seems to be missing or corrupt. Scandisk or another disk checking program may help.
Hey,
i just re-installed XP, and now my VERY IMPORTANT HARD DRIVE (d) is not working properly. XP sees it as unformatted "RAW" disk reporting only 32 GB (31.5GB)
anyone know what the hell happened?
Was it originally formatted as NTFS or FAT32? If so you may be in luck, coz they keep backup partition tables.
Bringing this thread back from the dead...
My current situation mirrors that of the original poster. I had a 40 and an 80 gig drive on my primary IDE channel. I recently switched to a SATA raid 0 configuration for my system drive and retired my other drives to straight storage roles.
Well, I popped out ym 40 gig today to give to my girlfriend and upon rebooting my 80 Gig showed as a 31.5 GB HDD with a RAW format file system.
I have swapped IDE cables and tried the drive in another comp with nothing but the same results.
Someone, SOMEONE, has got to be able to shed some light on this issue.
:loco:
I don't know what you guys have done to get this result as I've swapped more drives from one system to another to back up or recover a system swap drives around for upgrades recover systems whatever the case and I've never had this happen regardless of it being Fat32 or NTFS.
For the last poster if your 40 and your 80 were SATA and in a raid then yeah you can't just pop one of them out and expect it to work because they are reliant on them working within the raid configuration.
As for the orignial problems how did you format the drives and did you partition them ahead of time propperly? Where the original drives working together as 1 spanned drive or as 2 individual drives. If the drives were partitioned and formated propperly in the first place this shouldn't happen.
The only other possiblity is that your bios isn't supporting drive sizes of 200gigs and you need to use the software that should've come with those drives into tricking your computer into using the full 200gig drives. However you should have done this before you copied all your data over to them because using the tools to get your bios to recognize the correct drive size will erase any info on that drive.
Also was the "information" copied from one drive to another (as in OS and all) or was the OS reinstalled on the new drive them the personal files copied over?
I don't think you can just copy from one drive to another.
Always use Partition Manager when installing new harddrives to existing OS installs. It's a failsafe method. Does the bios see the drives right size? On the POST screen, does it recognize the drive properly?
My two drives were just vanilla ATA 100 and were not in raid. It was my 2 120s SATA that were in raid 0.
Turns out my partition information was lost or corrupted along the way but I was directed to use a really great program that was able to recover the partition information and write it to the drive. TestDisk scanned the drive and I was able to see my file system. I wrote the detected partition information the drive, rebooted and bam, my drive was back.
Give it a go and if you have any luck with the program.
Comments
I have a pc with two slots for hard drives, and I had a 120 and a 80 gb in there. I bought a 200 gb last weekend, so I disconnected my dvd burner and hooked up this 200 gb, formatted the 200gb, and then moved all the files from my 80 gb to the 200 gb. Then, I went back and took out my 80 gb and installed my 200 gb instead of it, and put back my dvd burner. Now when I start up XP, the drive is not recognized as a formatted drive with files in it. Instead, XP recognizes it as a raw unformatted 31.5 gb hard drive. The bios recognizes the hard drive, and device manager etc can see it. Maxtor has a program it sends with their hard drives, an installation program, so I tried installing that and seeing if it can troubleshoot. When I asked the program to reformat the 200 gb, it told me there are other files on the drive I will lose after the format, so I know the files aren't lost.
Therefore, does anyone know what I can do? My biggest problem is the fact that I deleted all the files from my 80 gb, before testing my 200gb, which is foolish, but hindsight doesn't help me here.
Any and all help is appreciated.
Thanks.
Was it originally formatted as NTFS or FAT32? If so you may be in luck, coz they keep backup partition tables.
My current situation mirrors that of the original poster. I had a 40 and an 80 gig drive on my primary IDE channel. I recently switched to a SATA raid 0 configuration for my system drive and retired my other drives to straight storage roles.
Well, I popped out ym 40 gig today to give to my girlfriend and upon rebooting my 80 Gig showed as a 31.5 GB HDD with a RAW format file system.
I have swapped IDE cables and tried the drive in another comp with nothing but the same results.
Someone, SOMEONE, has got to be able to shed some light on this issue.
:loco:
For the last poster if your 40 and your 80 were SATA and in a raid then yeah you can't just pop one of them out and expect it to work because they are reliant on them working within the raid configuration.
As for the orignial problems how did you format the drives and did you partition them ahead of time propperly? Where the original drives working together as 1 spanned drive or as 2 individual drives. If the drives were partitioned and formated propperly in the first place this shouldn't happen.
The only other possiblity is that your bios isn't supporting drive sizes of 200gigs and you need to use the software that should've come with those drives into tricking your computer into using the full 200gig drives. However you should have done this before you copied all your data over to them because using the tools to get your bios to recognize the correct drive size will erase any info on that drive.
I don't think you can just copy from one drive to another.
Turns out my partition information was lost or corrupted along the way but I was directed to use a really great program that was able to recover the partition information and write it to the drive.
TestDisk scanned the drive and I was able to see my file system. I wrote the detected partition information the drive, rebooted and bam, my drive was back.
Give it a go and if you have any luck with the program.