Internal HD showing explorer but not in Disk Manager and unable to

[GreyWolf]

I have a HP workstation DC5100 with Windows XP with SP3 installed and I have
two internal hard drives. I was attempting to defrag the hard drives and
getting an error that Disk Defragmenter could not start. After some
troubleshooting I notice that in Disk Management that the internal hard
drives did not show up and only the DVD drive was showing, from the command
line utility diskpart when I listed the disks. I have attempted to do a
chkdsk on reboot however it flash by so quickly that the only thing I cathc
is something about RAW drives then it skips the chkdsk. I have done a chkdsk
from a XP cd and it appears not to have changed anything. I have done a
fsutil dirty query C: and the dirty bit is not set and I have even tried to
set it and then go back and do the chkdsk w/o the CD and no success. Any
ideas on how to resolve this?

 

[John John - MVP]

I have a HP workstation DC5100 with Windows XP with SP3 installed and I have
two internal hard drives. I was attempting to defrag the hard drives and
getting an error that Disk Defragmenter could not start. After some
troubleshooting I notice that in Disk Management that the internal hard
drives did not show up and only the DVD drive was showing, from the command
line utility diskpart when I listed the disks. I have attempted to do a
chkdsk on reboot however it flash by so quickly that the only thing I cathc
is something about RAW drives then it skips the chkdsk. I have done a chkdsk
from a XP cd and it appears not to have changed anything. I have done a
fsutil dirty query C: and the dirty bit is not set and I have even tried to
set it and then go back and do the chkdsk w/o the CD and no success. Any
ideas on how to resolve this?

More likely than not the file system type in the MBR or boot sector is
incorrect. Try using a tool like Symantec's Ptedit32, or a disk editor,
or a recovery utility to see if you can re-assign the proper file system
type to the partition. These may help:

http://www.z-a-recovery.com/art-raw-filesystem.htm
CHKDSK: "RAW filesystem" message

http://blogs.technet.com/ganand/archive/2008/02/22/what-is-this-raw-file-system.aspx
What is this Raw File System

John

 

[GreyWolf]

Would this also account for the drives not being able to do a defrag as well
as not showing in diskpart and Drive Manager?

 

[John John - MVP]

Windows tools can't do anything with RAW drives, but I do believe that
the Disk Management tool should still show the disk and its partitions,
I'm not sure but I think it will simply show the file system as RAW or
Unknown, right click on the partition while in the Disk Management tool
as see what it says.

John

 

[GreyWolf]

Also the data on the hard drives is readable and accessable as well.

 

[John John - MVP]

Accessible from where? Which tools are you using to access the drive?
Windows *can* work with RAW partitions as long as you are using tools
that know how to read and write to the RAW partition, this is mostly
used only on enterprise server systems. Chkdsk, defrag, and the likes
don't know anything about RAW drives. If the data is readable and
accessible then this would seem to confirm that the problem is only one
of incorrect or conflicting file system identification in the MBR &/or
Boot Sector.

John

 

[GreyWolf]

I have tried to use these tools however they are not able to see the physical
disk for some reason. What suprises me is that the system is still booting
and working in the condition it is in. Anyway I am back to the drawing board
on this one short of slicking the customers computer and reinstalling
everything which according to the customer is not an option right now.

If you happen to come up with something please let me know and thank you for
the help so far.

God Bless