SATA Drive Not Recognized

[Ray Woodcock]

I have an SATA drive. Until yesterday, Windows XP recognized it as
just another drive in Windows Explorer. Now Explorer calls it "Local
Disk" and PartitionMagic reports it as "Unformatted."

I haven't changed anything in the configuration -- I was actually out
of town, and it did this when I returned, as soon as I turned the
machine on. The RAID array setup reports it as "Functional."

What's happening?

 

[Nathan McNulty]

It should be called a local disk. That is the default name for it. Are
you able to access it from withing Windows Explorer? It is possible
that Partition Magic is reading it improperly. Maybe you have the disk
set as a dynamic disk which Partition Magic does not understand?

Nathan McNulty

 

[Ray Woodcock]

I had partitioned the drive, formatted and named the partitions, and
placed data in the partitions. Windows Explorer and Partition Magic
recognized the partitions and the names. I have been working with
this drive for a month or two.

The Win98 boot floppy also fails to recognize it.

I haven't intentionally set the drive as a dynamic disk. Is that
something I might have done accidentally? What does it mean, and how
can I find out?

To all appearances, right now it's an unformatted 80GB drive, just
waiting to be partitioned and to have more data put onto it. And then
this can happen again? It's a little scary.

 

[Nathan McNulty]

Well, first, a Windows 98 Boot disk is not going to recognize the drive
as it would be NTFS and Windows 98 can't read NTFS. Second, I think you
meant Windows Explorer and Partition Magic fail to recongize the
partitions and the names? Third, you would have to change it to dynamic
on purpose, there is no way that I can think of to do this accidently.
Finally, it is possible that part of the drive has become corrupted,
lost its MFT, etc, and similar to old floppies, lost its data. I hope
this is not the case and I would try plugging the drive into another
computer and see if it works there.

Nathan McNulty

 

[Ray Woodcock]

Hi, Nathan. Thanks for writing back. All my partitions are FAT32. I
did have my drive C set as NTFS, but eventually reformatted to FAT32
and reinstalled WinXP on that.

I like the suggestion of plugging the drive into another machine and
trying it there. But now, as I think of it, this is the only machine
I have with a SATA connection. But I will experiment with plugging it
into the other SATA connection on this motherboard and see if, by some
random chance, that makes a difference.