Unable to Access D Drive

Can anyone please give me some assistance? My hard drive has two partitions, C and D, and I recently performed a clean install of XP on C. This seems to work fine but when I try to access the files that I had previously stored on the D drive Windows Explorer informs me that the D drive is not formatted. Running fdisk from a Windows 98 start-up floppy confirms the two partitions exist, with partition 1 set to active and using NTFS, whereas partition 2 is labeled as an Extended DOS partition and is FAT32. However, when I view the Extended DOS partition from fdisk it is listed as C rather than D. Performing a dir command on the drive now labeled as C reveals that my files (that I consider are stored on D) are there.

What do I need to do in order to get XP to recognize my D drive so that I can restore access to my files?

Thanks

 

ntfs cannot see fat 32,convert the fat to ntfs and map the drives

 

dai, NTFS can see FAT32. FAT32 cannot see NTFS. Though the advice is genuine.

 

dai / Firah, Thanks for your response. If I convert D to NTFS will I lose all of my data? How do I map the drives?

 

This isn't an answer but a precaution.

If the files on the partition you can't see from XP are critical, and you are planning on converting to NTFS, I would recommend having a backup of the entire partition somehow. Even when converting without problems that would be a good procedure. Since XP can't see the files only adds to the possibility of data loss.

How was the original drive partitioned and formatted. Were any 3rd party utilities used for this other than plain old fdisk and format?

 

One possible solution is to run Partition Magic to see if it detects any problems with the partitioning table. Since it is FAT32 you can even use the DOS version. Usually it can fix these types of problems.

 

Bob, thanks for your response. The drive was initially partitioned and formatted using standard DOS tools i.e. fdisk and format. I was initially running Windows ME and recently upgraded to XP by means of a clean install. Incidentally I have just tried using Norton Utilities to analyse the D drive and it reports that the file system is unknown. I'll try Partition Magic as you suggested.

 

That's why you might want to run PM from DOS rather than inside XP.

 

I have run PM from DOS and the prognosis does not look good. It identifies the partition but shows it as all used, whereas I know that it was less than 50% used. I tried checking for errors but PM returns an internal error code 45 CRC data error, which seems rather fatal. I also downloaded a trial version of some data recoverysoftware and that starts to read the cylinders on the disk but also eventually errors and aborts. I guess it's time to call a halt and accept the data loss (fortunately over 80% was backed up externally) and reformat. Anyway thanks to all for your help.

 

Actually, NTFS and FAT32 can't see anything. It's the OS that "sees", and Win98 can't see NTFS. However W2K or XP can see both file systems.

 

Of course, DVOM! Thanks for the clarification.

 

Can you put the drive in Win98 computer, access the drive, and backup the files.

 

Bob, yes you could do that if the 98 machine can read the drive.

Then reformat D: and load the files back on.

 

Since he could boot with a Win98 DOS disk and see the drives, it sound like this would be possible. There isn't much difference with 98 in the ability for seeing them from the OS or a boot disk.

 

I do have a Win98 machine available and will try to recover the files this way. Thanks again for all of your help.