Can't Access Hard Drive

[Guest]

Here's the story- I installed Vista Beta 2 as a clean install on my main
drive. My second drive is a 300gb Maxtor, on which I back up everything. I
then did an upgrade to Vista Pre RC1 with no issues. I decided to go back to
XP, but after I did that, now I can't access the 300gb drive. If I click on
it in my computer, I get the message that it is unformatted and I need to
format the drive. It was working fine when I last shut down the computer
prior to the XP reinstall. I also installed Pre RC1 as a dual boot, but it
couldn't access the drive either. What did Vista do to the drive and how do
I get it back? Are there specifc drivers to access the drive?
Thanks!

 

[Guest]

Ok so you have 2 hard drives installed on the computer. One has XP in it and
the other one is just for back up. You installed Vista on the drive where XP
used to be and now the other drive where your back ups are are not accesible.
You may have set that back up drive as "Dynamic Disk" under XP. So when XP
was removed the other OS did not recognize the drive as formatted. I did that
years ago with XP-unknowingly. The back up hdd needs to be set as "Basic
Disk" so all OS will recognize it (within Windows). If that's the case, don't
do anything on that drive. Don't reformat it or partition it as the data will
be completely destroyed. Get a disk data recovery software ( on-line) so you
can recover all the data. The data are still there, but it is not visible to
the new OS. Or try hooking up that drive to another computer see if the data
is accesible.

 

[A. T.]

Also you can set it up as the Primary master Drive and set up anyOS on it.
And then get your info out of it.

 

[Guest]

Thanks- I will check that out, but my disk recovery software was backed up on
that drive too! Any idea why Vista didn't recognize the drive when I did the
dual boot install? The data type is showing up as raw, is that just because
the drive isn't recognized? Does Vista use a different disk format?

 

[Guest]

More Info: I tried to use Acronis Disk Director to recover the partition,
but the drive doesn't show up in the program. In My Computer it shows up as
format=RAW and bytes used/available=0/0. The properties show the drive as
working properly. The drive was working fine at my last shutdown prior to
reformatting my Vista drive and reinstalling XP Pro.