Acessing FAT disks

  • Thread starter Thread starter Doug
  • Start date Start date
D

Doug

I recently replaced my old hard disk with a new one. At the same time I
upgraded to Windows XP. I installed XP to the new disk without any
problems. I then hooked up my old disk so I could transfer files to the new
one. I have a great number of music files and pictures. The old disk was
formatted FAT while I used NTFS for the new one (I don't know if this could
be part of the problem)
When I booted up I could not see the old disk. I went under control panel,
administrative tools, computer management, disk management. the two disks
show up as Disk 0 and Disk 1. When I right click on disk 1 and try to
assign a drive letter, that option is grayed out.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Doug Thornton
 
I double checked the jumpers. The only thing I could think of was that it
was somehow related to the FAT32 formatting of the old disk. I was going to
try and convert it to NTFS, but can't do that without a drive letter.
It appears that the only think I am able to do is convert to a dynamic disk,
but I'm not sure what that is.
 
Doug said:
I double checked the jumpers. The only thing I could think of was that it
was somehow related to the FAT32 formatting of the old disk. I was going to
Click to expand...

No, its NOT related to fat32. It could be, however, related to a disk
manager you used
on the old disk. If the old disk is now not the primary boot drive then
the disk manager will not load.
 
I don't think I had anything running.
Maybe I'll try hooking up the old disk as the boot disk and see if it can
see my Win XP disk as the D drive.
 
Doug said:
When I booted up I could not see the old disk. I went under control panel,
administrative tools, computer management, disk management. the two disks
show up as Disk 0 and Disk 1. When I right click on disk 1 and try to
assign a drive letter, that option is grayed out.
Click to expand...


Does Disk Management show a graphic of the drive, lower right, with the
partitions on it? If so, what does it say in each partition? 'Healthy
- Unknown' indicates that something (Partition magic is a likely
candidate) has set the 'hidden' bit on them. If so, it can be unwound
with PM, or with BootIT NG, from http://www.BootitNG.com ($35 shareware
- 30 day full functional trial)
 
Doug said:
I double checked the jumpers. The only thing I could think of was that it
was somehow related to the FAT32 formatting of the old disk
Click to expand...

It quite certainly is *not* caused by that
 
The problem does appear to be a diskmanager. It is a Gateway computer and
it appears that Gateway is running some type of disk manager software. Do
you have any clue on how to access the Gateway disk from my new XP disk?
 
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