loosing drive in windows xp....

[sitaversion]

hello,

i have two drives in my system, a 40gig seagate formatted with NTFS with windows etc on it, and a 80gig western digital formatted with FAT32. i have recently lost access to my 80 gig. when i click on the drive letter in windows explorer it asks me if i want to format this drive. i have an older drive (a 30 gig IBM) that had a copy of windows 98 on it, i put it in and booted up windows 98 and it can see the 80 gig drive and all its files etc.

this has led to me to believe that it something in windows xp that it stopping the drive to be accessed, as i know that their are files on the disk and their appears to be nothing wrong with the actual drive itself. so the question is how do i get to see the drive again in windows xp with out the hasstle of re-installing or re-formatting the drive? (i've just installed windows xp on my machine, and it could see the drive no worries, but this problem just seems to have cropped up out of nowhere)

 

[Nothingface]

Are you sure the 80 gig is FAT32 and the 40 gig is NTFS? Because if the 80 gig is NTFS and the 40 gig is FAT32, then Winxp won't see your NTFS drive (since FAT32 does not recognize NTFS). If that's not the case, then I have no idea.

 

[sitaversion]

nope the 80gig is definately FAT32, otherwise how would i see it in windows 98?

 

[Nothingface]

I think i'm confused..you lost access to your 80 gig from xp, but when you install the drive with 98, you can see it right? That's because 98 recognizes FAT32. But if you access it from a NTFS partition..that's your 40 gig..then you don't see the drive. Sorry if this makes no sense at all..i'm a bit confused and a bit tired.

 

[sitaversion]

Originally posted by Nothingface:
But if you access it from a NTFS partition..that's your 40 gig..then you don't see the drive.

well i can't access it when i use windows xp. (which is installed on my 40 gig NTFS formatted drive) it prompts me to format it.

 

[JohnWill]

Something in the partition table or directory has become corrupted to make XP think the drive is unformatted. You might try running something like Norton Disk Doctor on the drive from the W98 system and do any repairs suggested.

Note that you won't be able to format an 80gig drive as a single logical drive FAT32 with XP, although it will access it fine. If you end up formatting it, and want to keep it accessible by W98 and XP, you'll have to format it with W98 at a FAT32 drive.

 

[Lardog]

Originally posted by Nothingface:
Are you sure the 80 gig is FAT32 and the 40 gig is NTFS? Because if the 80 gig is NTFS and the 40 gig is FAT32, then Winxp won't see your NTFS drive (since FAT32 does not recognize NTFS). If that's not the case, then I have no idea.

Oh yeah, you're confused all right. "FAT32 does not recognize NTFS"???

Try going into Disk Manager in XP. Right click on the drive and see if there is an option to recover it or some such. I'm not certain what it says as all my disks are fine, but there should be something there along these lines. You might also try running "chkdsk /f" on the drive to repair any disk errors.

 

[sitaversion]

well i tried diskdoctor in windows 98 and it repaired some things but windows xp still cant see it. i cant do a chkdsk because it does this.....

C:\>chkdsk /f e:
The type of the file system is RAW.
CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives.

 

[mal1930]

Hi, This problem comes up a fair bit. I was interested because it happened twice to me.

I bought anew computer but when the shop installed my old drive XP could not see it. There only solution was to copy the files to a CD and then format the drive and everything was all right. XP could then see it.

A little later on I did a clean install of XP and the same problem came up again. I formatted and it could be seen.

The shop suggested it was because I formatted the drive using Partition Magic.

I have never seen an answer to the question on a forum and if you did a search I think you would find more than 1 thread asking about the problem.

 

[Jeerajat]

Checkur Event Viewer do u get any errors in there regarding ur hard drive. When booting up is that hard drive in the bios check?

what pertition is it do u have linux on at all?

http://www.duxcw.com/dcforum/DCForumID6/382.html

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/ar...=/technet/archive/columns/inside/04-21-00.asp

 

[aslanpak]

Have exactly the same problem with the RAW Disk. (Medium Rare actually)

After trying to install a 133 RAM, with a 100 RAM on a board that does not support 133, my NTFS drive suddenly became a RAW drive.

Chkdsk don't work, no good. It wants you to do a FDISK on it first.

Recovering data on the file drive is easy. I have tried three utilities:
1) R-Studio NTFS : DOn't work properly, too complex, can only recover partial info.!
2) Stellar Pheonix NTFS : Better then R-tudio, still not complete recovery, easier to use though.
3) GetDataBack for NTFS from Run Time Software: Best of the lot, complete recovery. Yýou can recover anything and everything, with a complete image of the disk.

Problem? YEah! you have to have another disk of atleast the same size, as it will not let you recover the files on the RAW Disk itself. You gotta copy all the files to another disk. Yuck. Buy a new disk? what happened to good old FAT recovery programs, why did i move to NTFS. Damn!

COme on guys, post something need help, or send 4300 Dollars so i can get a new disk.

 

[DR. BILLY]

I'm having the same problem and need help too.

I've got a new 80gb drive with XP NTFS on it and my new computer could't read my old 20Gb FAT32 Quantum drive. The sad thing is that now my old computer also won't read the drive anymore.

So here I am stuck with 20Gb of important data that I thought would be easy to shift between two drives using XP.
How wrong I was!!!

I've tried some undelete drive crash programs but none of them reconizes my old drive.

XP, like with you, reginizes my old drive but it also asks me to format it.

So we need some serious help over here.......!!!

See you guys

Peter Blansjaar
The Netherlands

 

[rkr3126]

Ive booted to win98 ms dos and checked the drive with dir it shows all 50 gig of files but XP still wants to reformat. When i first loaded xp it saw the 80 gig hd then it disappeared when it came back xp wanted to format it need help. Ive run spinwrite 6.0, handy recovery they don't help

 

[Elvandil]

Try booting from this floppy or CD and scanning the drive for damaged partitions and repairing them. Read the directions.

Partition Repair:

<--(Bootable floppy image) <--(Bootable CD image)

or

http://users.adelphia.net/~abraxas/dl/partfix.exe