2nd and 3rd HDs not showing up with ALL my data on them

[Krisalaska]

I would greatly appreciate someone to point me to some solution in the following WinXP problem.

I have altogether 3 WDCaviar HDs in my system. Recently, some troubled EasyCD Creator 4.0 installation led me to try to reformat my main 60GB HD into three partitions and try and install both Win98 and XP on it into separate partitions. Before doing so I Cut and Pasted all my personal files and settings from that main HD and saved it shared between the other two WDCaviar 10GB and 12GB HDs installed in the same system. After reinstalling the two Op.Systems on the main drive I can not get both or anyone of the two additional HDs come up under a corresponding drive letter in My Computer eithre under Win98 or WinXP. Neither can I see them when these HDs installed together nor when separately. I tried to connect the second HDs as a single drive on IDE2 channel with the appropriate jumper settings or as Slave with the first main HD or with the CDR drive. In all cases it shows up both in the BIOS and in WinXPs and Win98's Device Manager. But it never shows under a separate drive letter with all the files and folders and data on it under My Computer or Windows Explorer. The two drives I think were formatted under WinXP as FAT32 ages ago if I remember correctly.

Can anyone suggest something how to get to ALL of my personal data sitting on these two drives? (I have an ABIT KG7-Raid motherboard with AMD 1.4GHz running in it.)

Thanks so much in advance.

 

[Mulga]

You think the two drives were formatted as FAT32... are you sure? If they are NTFS and your current OSs are on FAT partitions this would explain it. Use fdisk or partition magic to have a look at the disks and see what shows up. fdisk will not recognise NTFS but will see the partition and identify it as non-dos. If this does prove to be the problem unfortunately you cannot convert a partition from NTFS to FAT32 non-destructively, at least to my knowledge. Your easiest way out of it would be to convert the partition with XP on it to NTFS All things are possible except skiing through a revolving door.

 

[Krisalaska]

Thanks for your help so far!

The 10GB C: partition on the first main HD drive is NTFS (while the rest is unallocated free space), the second HD is formatted as FAT32. At this point last night I have wiped out my main 60GB HD totally. I created only one C: 10Gb NTFS partition on it where I set up WinXP while the second 12GB HD connected as Master together with my CDR on the 2nd IDE channel. During the setup partitioning and formatting, the second 12GB HD did show up and was listed as FAT32. Of course I never thouched that one with formatting. Now it still does not show up with an individual drive letter despite WinXP set up on an NTFS partition supposed to be able to see and handle the second drive which is FAT32. Mind you, the problem was the same even when I set up WinXP on a FAT32 partition on the main HD drive previously.

In WinXP's Administrative Tools - Computer Management both HDs show up. The 10GB partition on the 60GB HD disk with the circa 50GB unformatted space on it as "C: healthy(system)" while the second HD shows its old name I had given to it ages ago through WinXPs Disk Management formatting as "WD_HD_12GB; 12.12GB FAT32; Healthy (active)".
BUT IT SHOWS NO DRIVE LETTER AT ALL.

What is the problem that it does not get assigned an appropriate drive letter and show up in My Computer with all the files?

Thanks ever so much!

 

[smah]

In XP's Disk management (Run, diskmgmt.msc), In the graphic at the bottom, right click on the 12Gb drive and select 'Change drive letter & paths'. Can you assign a drive letter?

 

[Krisalaska]

Nope! If I right click that partition only "Delete Partition" and "Help" comes up as highlighted active. "Change Drive Letter and Paths" is inactive.

 

[firewolfrl]

I had that problem with a third harddrive in my system
download this bootmanager.

http://www.xosl.org/

(freeware)
you need a small primary FaT32 partition on your HD0 drive (a small 52meg partition after the NTFS partition, make it active and install a dos sys to it, copy the entire xosl program to that partition make that partition active and boot to it and install xosl)
its is the best boot manager out there and can be configured extensivly. you can hide and unhide drives and partitions
using the partition magic DOS disks remove all the drive except the one you can't see
master it to hd0.
boot to partition magic and make the drive active, also check and see if the drive is hid and unhide.
reinstall all the drives and see if you can see the drive

Windows XP will see a NTFS partition that is not in hiding regardlous if it is on a FAT32 or NTFS partition
Partition magic will tell you if the partition is hid.
I suspect that is all that is wrong and all your data is intack and fine
good luck

 

[Krisalaska]

Thanks so much!
This bootmanager seems to be a very good idea. I noticed however at the website, that the latest, v.1.1.5 is a DOS/Win9x/WinMe platform. Does it work properly with WinXP Professional too?

If I understood you correctly, you make a very small primary FAT32 partition just for a DOS and XOSL istalled on it. Does it matter at all where on the same HDD this partition is located? In other words, if I make this very small FAT32 partition (with XOSL on it) the very first one on my HDD, then I make one more, bigger partition for Win98, then another bigger NTFS one for WinXP and leave the rest of the place to be a partition with a logical drive, where I tuck away all my data I create and save... is that a good idea for a setup? Altogether then I would have 4 partitions on my main 60GB disk, plus I would have my second and third HDD as separate drives.

Mind you, with the original problem, neither Partition Magic 5.0 nor Drive Image 2.0 worked on my additional HDDs. They both indicated a "type44" partition and only offered to delete and repartition them. No other choice. However, I realized, that if I hook these HDDs on IDE1 alone as a single drive in the system, each HDD boots with a DOS prompt as Drive C. There it lies my data in folders plus there is also COMMAND.COM on the HDDs. Also, I noticed that during bootup Roxio's GoBack 3.0 screen flashes up. That software came with Norton System works and was installed in my previous configuration. I suspected (whether correctly or not) that maybe Roxio's GoBack pulls these tricks on me. To make it shorter, I ended up restoring Trac0 on each HDD with Western Digitals utility (Easy Drive v.9.09w) diskett that came with one of the HDDs. Even that utility after examining the disk returned that it was an unknown type of partition. However, in the Advanced section it allowed for Trac0 to be restored to an earlier state. Ever since then the system sees these drives as separate ones and assigns a drive letter to them and I can access my data finally.

Nevertheless, this boot manager seems to be a very good idea to use.

Thanks for all your help and efforts a million times.

 

[firewolfrl]

I use xosl with four drives (windows XP, 2k, 98,SuSe linux)
the boot drive (HD0) is the drive that needs the small bootable DOS paritition
if XP is on a secondary drive as first primary
you need to use the Swap drive setting and your boot.ini will read
[boot loader]
timeout=5
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

this boot.ini is on a fourth drive and I am currently typing this info to you in this partition