Re-connect to HDs after XP re-format

April 5, 2006 4:41 PM

In an emergency situation, facing a serious deadline, Windows decides to stop working. Not knowing what else to do, I reformat the harddrive. Crisis averted. Now, how do I re-connect to my second and third harddrives?

I can see them, but I only get the option of formatting the harddrives completely thus losing all data. They work(ed) fine. One is a SATA and one is an IDE. Both only have data (music on one, videos on the other). I have a feeling there are some steps I should have taken to make this process a breeze, but like I said, it was an emergency and I didn't take much time to figure it out. Thanks for your help.

Computer specs: Windows XP (which is installed on C), two additional harddrives H and I. H is a Seagate Baracuda SATA drive. I is a Maxtor drive of some sort.

posted by panoptican to computers & internet (7 comments total)

The only thing that immediately occurs to me is that maybe the second and third drives are larger than your computer BIOS natively supports, perhaps you could look at the Seagate & Maxtor sites for a driver/utility/patch that enables support for the size of drives you're using.
posted by The Monkey at 5:11 PM on April 5, 2006

What does the Logical Disk Manager show you?
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 5:27 PM on April 5, 2006

Microsoft phone tech support does not ask for a SN# (at least didn't ask me,) and they can get on your machine and do all kinds of fancy stuff if you let them.

I lost one of the drives in a raid array, and the tech guy went in there and hand edited the headers and stuff and got my data back.
posted by StickyCarpet at 5:38 PM on April 5, 2006

Booting to Knoppix, are you able to mount the drives and view their contents?

You should be able to plug in an already-formatted hard drive into Windows without any problems. It's true that you might need a "big drive driver" for certain drives, but it's not usually a problem. Regarding The Monkey's suggestion, I think that if your motherboard has a SATA interface, the BIOS thing won't be an issue.

Unplug both drives and reboot. Shut down again, and plug in just the SATA drive and see that it's detected by your BIOS at boot. See if that shows up in the Disk Manager with something other than "format."

If you're able to access the data in Knoppix, then it's likely the partition is intact. If not, you may want to grab some software to repair partition tables, but if this is the case, you should be weary that you're playing with fire at this point. DiskPatch is amazing software for recovering partitions, and I happen to have a copy somewhere around here, (I think) so if it comes to it, feel free to email me.

If the drive works again, follow the same reinstall procedure for the IDE drive.
posted by disillusioned at 6:29 PM on April 5, 2006

You just need to go into logical disk manager and assign a drive letter to each partition.
posted by Rhomboid at 7:55 PM on April 5, 2006

"You should be able to plug in an already-formatted hard drive into Windows without any problems."

Not if you had converted that drive to a "dynamic drive". If so, then under a different installation of Windows, LDM would show it as a "foreign drive" and nothing else, with no letter(s) assigned to its partion(s). If you right click on "foreign drive", you will get an option to "import foreign disk", IIRC.

"You just need to go into logical disk manager and assign a drive letter to each partition."

I'm pretty sure that if the disks are "basic drives", whether or not the partitions are primary, Windows will automatically assign them drive letters. But I could be wrong.

If LDM sees the drives but no partitions on them, then there's a problem with the partition tables, I'd suspect. But that is fixable with the right utility.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 11:58 PM on April 5, 2006

Until just now, I have never heard of the Logical Disk Manager. Thanks for the help everyone. Both drives are once again running with all data intact.
posted by panoptican at 4:04 PM on April 9, 2006