Hard Drive Trouble

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Garzilla05

n00b
Joined
Nov 26, 2004
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42
I'm hoping someone can help me out with this because otherwise I'm completely screwed. I have two IDE Maxtor hard drives in my computer. A 60GB which is my main, and a 250GB as a slave. I decided that my computer was running a little too slow and I wanted to reformat. I reformatted the 60GB with no problems with WIndows XP Home. I have over 248GB of my pictures, movies, games, school work, and music on the slave. I've installed every driver that I can think of but the drive does not show up in My Computer. It shows that it exists when I check via BIOS, and it also appears in Device Manager. There aren't any error messages either. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the drive via Device Manager, and still no go. When I check on the drive via Control Panel->Administrative Tools -> Computer Management ->Storage -> Disk Management it doesn't display the drive size. It says that it's a "Dynamic" and "Foreign." Anything that anyone could suggest would save my life. I can't afford to lose all of this data with a reformat.
-Andrew
 
Go back to disk management, under actions, try rescan disks.

And for the future, come up with a good dvd backup strategy.
 
I had the same problem with a 250gb wd drive. I tried everything I could think of and the only thing that I kinda remember is going into comptuer management > Disk Management and right clicking the drive and "converting" to dynamic disk. Im not to sure if thats it, but it got my drive to reapppear with everything on it. I backed it all up and formatted as normal and everything it peachy keen.
 
defakto said:
Go back to disk management, under actions, try rescan disks.

And for the future, come up with a good dvd backup strategy.
Click to expand...

Already tried it, no luck.
 
hity645 said:
I had the same problem with a 250gb wd drive. I tried everything I could think of and the only thing that I kinda remember is going into comptuer management > Disk Management and right clicking the drive and "converting" to dynamic disk. Im not to sure if thats it, but it got my drive to reapppear with everything on it. I backed it all up and formatted as normal and everything it peachy keen.
Click to expand...

Under Properties it's already listed as a dynamic disk. My only option is to convert to a "basic disk," but that would whipe all of the information on the drive. Could this problem have arisen due to my reformatting with Windows XP Home? I previously had this drive working on Professional before I reformatted my other HD.
 
Well, I think I figured it out. It is the difference in the operating systems.

"Dynamic Disk Storage
Dynamic storage is supported in Windows XP Professional, Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003. A disk initialized for dynamic storage is called a dynamic disk. A dynamic disk contains dynamic volumes, such as simple volumes, spanned volumes, striped volumes, mirrored volumes, and RAID-5 volumes. With dynamic storage, you can perform disk and volume management without the need to restart Windows.

Note: Dynamic disks are not supported on portable computers or on Windows XP Home Edition-based computers.
"

Off to reformat again. Thanks to all who helped.
-Andrew
 
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