Reinstalled XP won't recognize HD

huypham · Post by **huypham** » Sun Oct 16, 2005 10:55 pm

I apologize for the long post, but I've been staring at this problem for about 8 straight hours.

I run a Athlon 2600+ on a Biostar M7NCD, which is a Nforce2 chipset. I have 2 HDDs, a 30 gig Maxtor and a 400 gig Seagate. I had both running in Windows XP.

I reformatted the 30 gig HD and installed Windows XP. The 400 gig HDD is recognized in Disk Managment but as "unallocated". I installed SP2 in hopes that it would help, but to no avail.

I tried both microsoft IDE drivers and Nvidia's.

I tried to fdisk /mbr to no avail. I checked jumpers and set the HDD to master and removed the attached cd rom, but still no luck.

When I run Partition Magic, it tells me that the 400 gig HD has a corrupt EZ-Drive and needs to be re-installed. I booted with Seagate's installation CD, but it could not find any overlay program.

However, all my files still exist as mentioned in File Scavenger, a free file recovery tool.

Anybody know how I can get XP to recognize my HD?

Thanks for the help! I appreciate it.

Huy

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 7:56 am

Sorry about your problem.

Partition Magic is usually correct about disk manager programs. Being such a large drive, if you orginally partitioned it with Seagate's utility it may have installed a disk manager by default. I hate disk managers.

NOTE: I did a quick search and EZ-Drive is used by Western Digital and IBM not Seagate, unless that's changed recently. Might you have used a 3rd party Disk Manager when you originally partitioned that drive?

I'm not sure it was a good idea to do perform an FDISK /MBR on a drive formatted with NTFS. Not sure of the consequences.

You should NEVER use FDISK on a XP NTFS partition. If you have to repair the MBR you should use FIXMBR from the command line of the Windows XP Recover Console (Boot from the XP CD and select Recovery Console).

You should also have installed SP2 before connecting the 400Gb HDD. Pre-SP2 XP doesn't support 48-bit LBA (137Gb max HDD size). It's possible that booting up without SP2 installed and while the drive was connected caused Windows to corrupt the drive when it tried to write to it (which it would for two reasons: 1) In a new XP install Windows always puts an ID stamp on a newely detected HDD, 2) Windows does a System Restore on all drives when you first boot).

The REAL concern is the possibility that you DO have a disk manager on that drive. They're like a virus - difficult to remove without the disk manager utility that installed it.

Did you by any chance have Norton GoBack installed in your old OS install? GoBack acts just like a Disk Manager and you can't access the drive unless GoBack is running or you remove it from the drive.

Other suggestions: Create a BartPE CD from an SP2 Windows CD, boot into BartPE and see if you can access the drive from BartPE's file browser. I doubt this will work thout - I'm certain that the drive partition is corrupt. Similarly you can connect the drive to another computer running XP SP2 and see if you can access it.

You can try running the diagnostic in Seagate's utility. It should detect the corrupt partition and offer to try to repair it. WARNING: I'd backup your data first - you could possibly make things worse.

You could also try to ScanDisk it, but that may also make it worse.

Chances are that drive is corrupt. Your best bet is to use a recovery utility to backup your data, then wipe the drive (to play safe I'd zero fill the drive - you can usually do that with the Seagate utility or a security eraser like DBAN). Then re-partition and format.

Hope this helps...

huypham · Post by **huypham** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 11:22 am

Thanks Flying Penguin.

Yeah, I gave up after hours of work and just saved what data I could. I did lose about 20%, but since I was expecting total loss, that's not as bad as expected.

I went with FAT32 this time around. Forget NTFS.

Thanks for all your help.

Huy

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 3:07 pm

Actually NTSF is a much more stable file system than FAT32. Your problem was NOT caused by the NTFS dile system. Something else went wrong along the way. More than likely because you tried to access a formatted drive larger than 137Gb with a pre-SP2 install for WinXP.

Be aware that there are some limitations to FAT32. You cannot have a file size larger than 4Gb, which is a problem if you edit video files or use a DVD copy utility (the temporary ISO file will be larger than 4Gb for a full DVD).

If that's not a problem and you've already formatted it as FAT32 then don't sweat it. Otherwise you can always convert it to NTFS using the following DOS command line:

CONVERT X: /fs:ntfs

Where C: is a name of the drive you want to convert.

After machine re-boot conversion process will start and you'll have your FAT32 converted to NTFS.

123cool · Post by **123cool** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 5:42 pm

just one thing FP will using that command will it get rid of the files on that drive or keep them? ive used that command before but cant remember, would like to change my win98 to NTFS(i got rid of Win98).

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 5:49 pm

The Convert command will not lose your data (although it would be prudent to backup anything really important - something could always go wrong).