Hard drive Error

[Maciek]

First of All I have 2 hard drives on my system. One is a
10 Gig and the other is a 40 Gig. The Operating system is
on the 10 Gig and the 40 Gig is used mainly for storage.
Recently I upgraded my computer and formatted the c:/ and
installed Win Xp on it, I chose to use the NFTS file
system on the 10 Gig hard drive. Now because before it
was FAT32, when I go into windows it does not detect the
40 Gig d:/ and tells me that I need to format it. Is
there anything I could do in order not to loose any of
the information on that Drive?????

 

[purplehaz]

XP can read NTFS drives and/or Fat32 drives, so it doesn't matter what the
drive is formatted as. The operating system is what "reads" the drive and xp
can "read" both file systems. So the file format is not your problem. Does
the drive show in device manager? What is it listed as in disk
management(right click my computer, mange, disk management)?

 

[Cari MS-MVP]

The NTFS should be able to read the FAT32 formatted drive. Have you
assigned it a drive letter? What does Disk Management say about the drive?

(Right click on My Computer, select Manage... on the following screen, click
on Disk Management... the drive should appear on the right hand screen)

Cari
www.coribright.com

 

[Maciek]

In Disk Management it finds the hard drive and its
labeled as D:/ Type is Basic but there is no File System,
also it does not recognize that the HD is a 40gb

 

[Maciek]

In Disk Management it finds the hard drive and its
labeled as D:/ Type is Basic but there is no File System,
also it does not recognize that the HD is a 40gb

 

[Cari MS-MVP]

Is it still correctly identified in the BIOS?

Cari
www.coribright.com

 

[purplehaz]

Check to make sure all the cables are tight. Go into the bios and see if the
drive is listed correctly. See if you can access the 40gb drive via a win9x
floppy boot disk(dos). If you can access it in dos then you know it is still
formatted correctly with fat32 and you can check to see if your data is
still there. If its all good in dos, you could try a repair install of xp
and maybe it will find the drive correctly this time. A drastic approach
would be to copy off your important data in dos and then format the drive in
xp. There also may be a command line fix in the xp setup recovery console.
If there is someone should post it, I don't know off hand.