About 6 months ago my only hard drive (IBM, 40Gig)
started to fail (noises and folders would disappear) so I
installed a second hard drive (Western Digital, 60 Gig).
I am running XP. I used the WD tools to create a copy of
my failing drive. I could not boot with the new drive
alone (xp would start to load but then I would get the
floating windows logo,) but this was not a huge deal as
it was at least a back up of my data. Every once in a
while I would send new files to my 'lifeboat' drive.
Well over the weekend I bought a new hard drive (Maxtor,
40 Gig) and connected it alone to my PC. I formatted it,
reinstalled XP and my applications, etc. This worked
fine. Once this new hard drive was close to what I
wanted I attached the lifeboat as a slave to move files
over to the new master.
Windows XP now sees the lifeboat drive as F, but when I
explore it, I receive a message that it needs to be
formatted. I don't want to do that and lose the data. I
ran the Western Digital (WD) diagnostics and the drive
checks just fine. I started to "easy install" process
from the WD floppy and the tool tells me that there is an
existing fat32 partition on the drive. I back out of the
tool and no formatting takes place. So, it looks like
the WD tools realize the drive is formatted while XP does
not. Both master and slave jumpers are set to cable
select and the connections are fine (I even reversed them
for kicks, but the PC could not boot.)
Off I went to the western digital tech support site and
found a matching article with no resolution:
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-
bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?
p_sid=LOU__HZg&p_lva=&p_faqid=1076&p_created=1063317716&p_
sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9ncmlkc29ydD0mcF9yb3dfY250PTMyMSZwX3NlYXJ
jaF90ZXh0PWZvcm1hdCBkcml2ZSB3aW5kb3dzIHhwJnBfc2VhcmNoX3R5c
GU9NCZwX3Byb2RfbHZsMT1_YW55fiZwX3Byb2RfbHZsMj1_YW55fiZwX2N
hdF9sdmwxPX5hbnl_JnBfc29ydF9ieT1kZmx0JnBfcGFnZT0y&p_li=
Article Title: Cannot access data on a slave drive after
reinstalling Windows 2000 or XP on the master drive.
I have looked at Microsoft's site as well but cannot see
an article with a resolution. Does anyone have any
ideas? Thanks, Christian
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