W7 doesnt recognize drive?

C

CmaN3

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 5, 2004
Messages
368
Ok, so I just installed my copy of W7 on my shiny new computer. I have two HDDs in my system. One is a brand new WD 320. The other is an older WD750 green drive. The 750 has ~400gigs of music and movies on it.

When I tried to install, windows would not install no matter what I did with both drives in. It kept saying it needed to put files on the 750(i was trying to install the on the 320). It said that it couldnt do this because the 750 was not formatted correctly. So whatever, I unhook the 750 and it installs in a snap. However now, it can "see" the 750, however it says that it isnt formatted and is inaccesible. This drive worked perfectly fine literally an hour ago in my old computer. I really dont wanna lose all my music and movies, so anyone got any ideas?

System:
Phenom 925 x4
Sapphire 5850
4g OCZ ram
MSI 790X mobo
2 WD HDDs

EDIT: windows says the drivers are up to date for it aswell.
 
Do you have another machine that it will work in? if so, try running a check disk on it, then put it back in your Win 7 machine...
 
Yea I can try that I guess. The thing is though that it worked fine in XP on my old rig, then I took it out and put it straight in my new one and now it wont read it.
 
If it has been formatted on Windows XP that alone could cause problems, generally NTFS has a new revision with each new OS introducing new features.

this shouldn't be a problem but you never know.

If the drive has been formatted as FAT32, you could try converting the drive on Windows XP to NTFS using disk part, this can be done without loosing data.
 
It is formatted in NTFS. When I was trying to install W7 it said the partition type was dynamic on that drive, but it did say it was NTFS. Is there any way to "upgrade" the NTFS so i dont lose data?
 
Its the dynamic part that is screwing you up, it should be basic. I don't know if you can switch it back to basic without formating it. Dynamic allows spanning and such, kind of a software raid. You'll have to look it up and do some reading to see if windows 7 disk management will let you change it without loosing the data on the drive.
 
CmaN3 said:
It is formatted in NTFS. When I was trying to install W7 it said the partition type was dynamic on that drive, but it did say it was NTFS. Is there any way to "upgrade" the NTFS so i dont lose data?
Click to expand...

The NTFS version is not the issue. It shouldn't be reading it as a Dynamic drive coming from XP. I would first - make sure you have it backed up before doing anything else!

pcgeek11
 
I never install an OS with a formatted drive present, especially not one with important data on it. If you didn't want to back up all of that music, that 750 should have been disconnected before you ever tried installing Windows 7. If it was me, I'd move the data off the drive to another computer or external drive, and then format it clean from within Windows 7, and then restore your data to it.
 
That sucks. Ive done the same thing before with XP without any issues so I assumed it would be fine. I have a spare copy of XP that im going to install to dual boot, and see if that recognizes it.

I dont have it backed up because none of the data is anything really important. Its just stuff that I would prefer not to lose.
 
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