Disk Management says NTFS(Healthy) but explorer says raw as if unformatted.

[jozeph78]

I see a lot of topics on this issue but nothing that has so far helped
me out. I recently installed Vista, went fine, I liked it but gaming
drivers let me back to XP. I deleted, reformated and installed XP on
the first partition where the MBR resides. Everything installed but I
have a major problem with it reading my hard disks.


I have 3 HD's, one has 3 partitions; 60GB(MBR OS drive),50GB (I install
mostly apps here),5GB (swap disk partition). The other two disks are a
single partition 300GB Raid 1 configuration for all of my data and
multi-media files.

In Disk Management, the drives all have NTFS(Healthy) as their status
and have the proper values for total and available size. However, in
explorer they disks are "inaccessable" and going right-click-->
properties says they are empty RAW disks. I reformatted my swap disk
which doesn't have any data and it is now recognized by windows. I
could do the same thing for the 50GB partition but I really can't do
the same from my 300GB Array. I didn't perform any type of maintainence
during the XP install that would affect this drive. In fact, it's SATA
and unavailable during the installation process.

Obviously, the data is still there and the partition is unaffected but
for some reason Windows explorer can't mount the disk. As I mentioned,
I have about 5 or 6 things to try based on what I've read so far but
most advise is to backup and restore; something I'd rather not do with
220GB of data. I want explorer to treat the disk the way Disk
Management sees it, as a healthy NTFS partition... what gives?

 

[jozeph78]

Esentially, this was a file permissions issue. Because Simple File
Sharing was enabled, I did not see the security tab and could not take
ownership of the drives. I don't know why it would lie about the file
system though. I could easily see the file system type in disk manager
and any recovery tool would have let me copy the files. Pretty weak if
you ask me. Thank god I didn't waste more than a day on this fudge.