What is the effects of disk initialization

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Guest

First of all: I'm using a dansih version of WinXP and it's been 5 years or so
since I've last worked with english languaged versions of Win OS'es, so I may
translate some terms incorrectly.

What went wrong:
explorer.exe began acting strange, constantly using 99% CPU-power even
though I didn't do any file transactions. I tried to move a file which
resulted in an error message saying that the file was locked by other
processes. It was an avi-file, and I had'nt any mediaplayers running, and I
even disabled my antivirus-service at some point, and rebooted and all.
Then I ran chkdsk in a command promt on the drive, using an "force
disconnection of all open handles to the drive"-option (I use the drive only
for storage).
Then I tried to move the file again, which still wasn't possible, and maybe
I rebooted once more, whereafter I went to work.
9 hours later explorer still used all my CPU-power, and then I definately
rebooted, and when the system (WinXP) was up and running, the two (logical)
drives on the storage disk were gone ;-(

What I've done:
I've used a super nice DOS tool named Active Partition Recovery to restore
the partition tables (halleluja), and now I can see the two drives and
navigate through files and folders using the XP Command Console, but I still
can't see the drives from WinXP.

When I start up the "Disk handling" in "Computer Administration" a disk
initialization wizard pops up saying that the Logical Disk Manager can't
access the drive before it has been initialized.

Earlier on I've only initialized empty disks, and I'm not sure what the disk
initialization process do. I've searched through windows help, MSDN and this
forum (probably using the wrong keywords) without any satisfying results.

Can someone pls tell me if my data will survive the WinXP disk
initialization process?
 
New disks appear as Not Initialized.

Before you can use a disk, you must first initialize it.

If you start Disk Management after adding a disk, the Initialize Disk Wizard
appears so you can initialize the disk.

You can then determine the nature and type of Disk: basic, dynamic etc. You
can partition it. You can format it [using XP Disk Management it is only
possible to format as NTFS].
 
Thanks, BAR, I appreciate your answer but it doesn't help me. My question was
robably a bit unclear (usually I'm also in lack of terms when I'm having
problems with my pc ;-)

I know the stuff you say, which is 100% correct and in accordance with
chapter 12 in the WinXP resource kit
(http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/Default.asp).

I have two HDDs in my pc; one with the boot and system partitions, and one
with a big partition for storage purposes (160GB). It's the storage drive I
can't access from WinXP GUI at the moment.

If I boot up in the command console / recovery console (I don't know the
proper term, it's the boot option you get after running winnt32.exe with the
/cmdcons-switch) the storage drive is there. I can access all the folders and
copy files (one at a time using the extremly restricted COPY command
available through this cmdcond-UI (the file handling commands you get is like
a restriction version of DOS 5)).

When I'm in the 'normal' WinXP the drive can't be accessed, since the disk
(the MBR) has been (successfully) recovered using a nice little 3rd-party
DOS-tool.

It's not a new disk because it contains data which are accessible using both
cmdcons and Winternals nifty NTFSreader and it's not a disk coming from
another WinXP system since it is not initialized and it therefore can't be
imported as described in the above mentioned resource kit.

It's something in between which I haven't found any explicit descriptions
of. It's like if you move a HDD from a Win98 system to a WinXP system (if you
have two pc's). What will happen to the data on the HDD in this case?

The disk is new to that specific WinXP system (and some checksums has to be
calculated so that Microsoft can discover major hardware changes and prompt
for re-activation).

But is this the only aspect of the word 'new' which you also use in your
answer.

Or does 'new' mean that WinXP regards the HDD as 'blank' and then mess up
the existing MBR?
 
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