Hard-drive Recovery - OS Not recognizing previous NTFS formated dr

[Guest]

I had my main drive crashed on me due to a corrupt system file. I tried to
use the Recovery Councle (which would not oppen). Managed to find out the
amount of disk space I used out of the total capacity of the drive;
suggesting that my data on the drive remained, possibly, intact. I did a
Chkdsk on the drive; no fixes were required. I went into the properties area
on the drive; it stated that the drive was working properly. I had the drive
rplaced and re-installed my XP-Pro OS, etc, etc.

I then converted my old Main drive to become an external (USP) backup drive
to recover my files. I've done this five privous times; each time it worked.
However, this time, My Computer could not display it as an external drive.
When I went into Manage under My computer/Storage; I got an indication that
the drive was not activated, or whatever. I reactived the drive and assigned
a drive letter and it finally came up under My Computer.

Even though I had already formated the drive to NTFS when it was new; each
time I tried going into the drive I received an error message stating I must
first format the drive to NTFS. The error message also said that XP did not
recognize the exiting, "RAW" format.

Is there a way to format a drive to NTFS for only new files? Are there any
other ways of recovering my files (minus) the old OS?

John

 

[Al Brumski]

This is taken from XP help:

*******************************************************************
To convert a volume to NTFS from the command prompt
Open the Command Prompt window.
In the command prompt window, type
convert drive_letter: /fs:ntfs

For example, typing convert D: /fs:ntfs would format drive D: with the
ntfs format.

Notes

To open a command prompt, click Start, point to All Programs, point to
Accessories, and then click Command Prompt.
You can convert FAT or FAT32 volumes to NTFS with this command.
**********************************************************************************

Don't know if this helps, i"ve done it for old FTA 32 fs's and it's
worked.

Al