Primary slave drive is Unreadable

[Linda]

My system is a Win 2000 Server. I have an IBM drive as the primary master
drive and a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 120GB as the primary slave drive. This
configuration has been working for the past 4 months.



Yesterday when I started the system I got an error shown on the blue screen:
"Can not load the system file - \\SYSTEMROOT\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SOFTWARE, it is
corrupt, damaged, .". I couldn't fix this problem by all means, so I
reinstalled the Win 2000 Server system.



The issue is I can't access the primary slave drive any more. The Windows
Device Manager told tells me: "This device is working properly". The Windows
Disk Management tells me the disk 1 (primary slave drive) is dynamic and
Unreadable. I tested the drive using Maxtor's PowerMax.exe and it passed all
tests. The original drive letter E is still appearing in Windows Explorer
and so is another drive letter H that used to be a mapping letter to another
machine. When I click on either E or H, I got message saying: "E:\ is not
accessible. The parameter is incorrect".



How can I recover from this situation? Before I do anything to it I want to
get some advice from this group. I can't afford to lose the data. Thanks a
lot.



Linda

 

[bluezulu]

My system is a Win 2000 Server. I have an IBM drive as the primary master
drive and a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 120GB as the primary slave drive. This
configuration has been working for the past 4 months.



Yesterday when I started the system I got an error shown on the blue screen:
"Can not load the system file - \\SYSTEMROOT\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SOFTWARE, it is
corrupt, damaged, .". I couldn't fix this problem by all means, so I
reinstalled the Win 2000 Server system.



The issue is I can't access the primary slave drive any more. The Windows
Device Manager told tells me: "This device is working properly". The Windows
Disk Management tells me the disk 1 (primary slave drive) is dynamic and
Unreadable. I tested the drive using Maxtor's PowerMax.exe and it passed all
tests. The original drive letter E is still appearing in Windows Explorer
and so is another drive letter H that used to be a mapping letter to another
machine. When I click on either E or H, I got message saying: "E:\ is not
accessible. The parameter is incorrect".



How can I recover from this situation? Before I do anything to it I want to
get some advice from this group. I can't afford to lose the data. Thanks a
lot.



Linda

Hi Linda,

I have encoutered the same problem - how did you get on ?

Bluezulu

 

[Drazenka1973]

This might help

Hi Linda,

I had problem like yours few months ago but with winxp pro.

I think that you or somebody else who did first setup of server win2k format second hdd as dynamic. When you move out hdd from your system or reinstal it you won't be able to read data from that hdd.

If you have important data on that hdd which you want to save use knoppix (http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-mirrors/index-en.html). When you save your data try to format that hdd but like logical drive (NOT dynamic).

Best regards

Drazenka

 

[bluezulu]

Unreadable Hard Drive

I discovered that by taking the unreadable hard drive out of my PC (where it was the slave drive) and putting into my work PC I could access and read all the files

As I did not have a back up of the files, I bought an external Hard Drive and copied all the files off the formerly unreadable drive onto the new external drive. Then I re-installed the slave hard drive onto my home PC and reformatted the drive and finally copied the files off the external HD back onto the slave HD

Whilst this was long winded and cost me £80 for the external HD it did resolve the problem and has the added bonus of giving a back copy of the files (something I had always 'intended' to do !)

regards
bluezulu