Hard Drive Trouble

[Krelm]

Hi.

I recently purchased a Samsung SP1604N 160GB HDD. When i set it up etc, i had to use Ontracks Disk Manager to update my bios to support the size of the hard drive. After this the HDD worked fine.

Now, i used the 160GB to store all my data from my old hdd so i could format and re-install XP. I am now on a fresh install of XP.

The problem is, XP is not detecting the 160gb anymore. I have used Disk Manager but it seems the only way for that software to help me is to re-format, something i cannot do because i have alot of data on it.

There must be someway of getting around this, or at least recovering the data.

Any help will be very much appreciated, thank you.

Edit - I have updated my BIOS and installed SP2. Still no difference.

 

[piller1999]

is the drive still detected by the motherboard when you boot up?

check to make sure the cabling and jumpers are set correctly, etc etc. if the drive isn't detected by the motherboard.

this is really dumb, but one time i spent 15 min figuring out why i couldnt see my 2nd hdd in windows. turns out i couldnt see it b/c i had unplugged the power cable to the hdd.

 

[Krelm]

is the drive still detected by the motherboard when you boot up?

check to make sure the cabling and jumpers are set correctly, etc etc. if the drive isn't detected by the motherboard.

this is really dumb, but one <a href="http://www.ntsearch.com/search.php?q=time&v=56">time</a> i spent 15 min figuring out why i couldnt see my 2nd hdd in <a href="http://www.ntsearch.com/search.php?q=windows&v=56">windows</a>. turns out i couldnt see it b/c i had unplugged the power cable to the hdd.

Yes the hard drive is detected by my motherboard, since i installed a later version of VIA chipset drivers, the drive now shows up in Windows too, but it still does not recognise the partition (NTFS btw). I know the data is on there.

 

[piller1999]

try doing this: we're gonna see what windows thinks about your drive...

On the desktop, right click my computer, then hit manage.

On the left, go to Disk Management

What does it say about your 160 gb hdd?

It should say things like File System is NTFS, the capacity / size, is it healthy, etc.

if everything looks ok, then i'm not sure what next to do-

you might want to have a mod move this message to the hard drive forum... there are some really smart folks in there who know tons about hard drives.

 

[Krelm]

try doing this: we're gonna see what <a href="http://www.ntsearch.com/search.php?q=windows&v=56">windows</a> thinks about your drive...

On the desktop, right click my <a href="http://www.ntsearch.com/search.php?q=computer&v=56">computer</a>, then hit manage.

On the left, go to Disk Management

What does it say about your 160 gb hdd?

It should say things like File System is NTFS, the capacity / size, is it healthy, etc.

if everything looks ok, then i'm not sure what next to do-

you might want to have a mod move this message to the hard drive forum... there are some really smart folks in there who know tons about hard drives.

I did that, and the drive shows up, and it even has the same size partition that i set it to before, but it doesnt actually register as an NTFS partition, its just blank.

I tried Partition Magic, it says that i have EZ-Drive running and that it is corrupt. Not sure what that is about.

And if a mod could move this that would be great, i did not realise i posted in the wrong forum.

 

[djnes]

My guess is you used some utility to partition the drive that creates it's own MBR on the disk. The drive may not be readable unless that utility is installed.

If it was me, I'd have Norton Ghost Corporate running on a second machine, and I would ghost the partition to the server and use Ghost Explorer to open the file and remove the data I wanted to keep.

I'm not sure if it works like this anymore, but you used to be able to fdisk the MBR and then boot the PC, letting Windows re-create the MBR and then the drive was usually readable. Not sure if that works anymore.

 

[killerD]

Did you update to SP1? There is a limit on how big a drive Windows can recognize without SP1 installed I had the same problem. Don't try converting it to basic that will wipe it out.

Edit: Sorry I see you are using SP2, what options will it let you do from disk managament?