More Hard Drive Problems...

[LannyL]

OK...I finally got XP Pro running on a 50 GB partition on a 160 GB Drive.

I have a 60 GB drive which is partitioned roughly 20/40. The 20 used to be
the C: drive with windows installed on it and the 40 was for storage. This
drive is now set up as a the primary slave.

The problem is that the drive shows up in computer management as a single
partition with no drive letter, and does not show up in My Computer at all.
I tried to convert it to a Dynamic Drive, as this was the only option
available, but it said there is no free space on the partition. In
actuality there is 11GB free on the drive.

How can I get at the data?

I have a second hard drive problem too...
I have an external 80GB Maxtor Firewire drive. It has developed bad
sectors affecting roughly 500kb. I have 60GB of files on the drive that
I'd like to transfer to another drive. The drive is recognized in My
Computer and assigned a letter. It shows that 60GB are used, but the only
folder that appears in Windows Explorer is "Recycled", which is empty.

Please help me save my files...

Thanks,
Lanny Lipson
--
_______________

"Language is so small, and ridiculously cumbersome, and stupid."
-J. Garcia

mail@lannyl dot com
www.lannyl.com

[R. C. White]

Hi, Lanny.

> The problem is that the drive shows up in computer management as a single
> partition with no drive letter, and does not show up in My Computer at
all.

By "computer management", do you mean the Disk Management component of the
MMC? (I find it easier to focus on DM if I start it directly by typing at
the Run line: diskmgmt.msc. Then I maximize the window and click View to
see the Volume List at the top and the Graphical View at the bottom.) Click
Help | Help Topics and search for Importing disks and Initializing status.
There's a lot of information in this Help file.

You might need to click Action | Rescan Disks. Also, you may need to
Initialize the drive.

What does Disk Management tell you about your 60 GB drive? In the Graphical
View, is it Disk 0, Disk 1, or some other number? Is it labeled "Online"?
How many GB does it show as the capacity of the whole HD? Does any of this
change if you plug or unplug your Firewire drive? (It would be safer to
leave that drive unplugged until you get the 60 GB drive properly
organized.)

I've been afraid to try Dynamic Disks. From what I've read in the
documentation and in newsgroup posts, it appears there are many
opportunities to lose everything with a simple misstep.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX

Microsoft Windows MVP

"LannyL" > wrote in message
...
> OK...I finally got XP Pro running on a 50 GB partition on a 160 GB Drive.
>
> I have a 60 GB drive which is partitioned roughly 20/40. The 20 used to
be
> the C: drive with windows installed on it and the 40 was for storage.
This
> drive is now set up as a the primary slave.
>
> The problem is that the drive shows up in computer management as a single
> partition with no drive letter, and does not show up in My Computer at
all.
> I tried to convert it to a Dynamic Drive, as this was the only option
> available, but it said there is no free space on the partition. In
> actuality there is 11GB free on the drive.
>
> How can I get at the data?
>
> I have a second hard drive problem too...
> I have an external 80GB Maxtor Firewire drive. It has developed bad
> sectors affecting roughly 500kb. I have 60GB of files on the drive that
> I'd like to transfer to another drive. The drive is recognized in My
> Computer and assigned a letter. It shows that 60GB are used, but the only
> folder that appears in Windows Explorer is "Recycled", which is empty.
>
> Please help me save my files...
>
> Thanks,
> Lanny Lipson

[BuzzyBody]

Use Easy recovery Professional and or try run chkdsk on each drive.

"LannyL" > wrote in message
...
> OK...I finally got XP Pro running on a 50 GB partition on a 160 GB Drive.
>
> I have a 60 GB drive which is partitioned roughly 20/40. The 20 used to
be
> the C: drive with windows installed on it and the 40 was for storage.
This
> drive is now set up as a the primary slave.
>
> The problem is that the drive shows up in computer management as a single
> partition with no drive letter, and does not show up in My Computer at
all.
> I tried to convert it to a Dynamic Drive, as this was the only option
> available, but it said there is no free space on the partition. In
> actuality there is 11GB free on the drive.
>
> How can I get at the data?
>
> I have a second hard drive problem too...
> I have an external 80GB Maxtor Firewire drive. It has developed bad
> sectors affecting roughly 500kb. I have 60GB of files on the drive that
> I'd like to transfer to another drive. The drive is recognized in My
> Computer and assigned a letter. It shows that 60GB are used, but the only
> folder that appears in Windows Explorer is "Recycled", which is empty.
>
> Please help me save my files...
>
> Thanks,
> Lanny Lipson
> --
> _______________
>
> "Language is so small, and ridiculously cumbersome, and stupid."
> -J. Garcia
>
> mail@lannyl dot com
> www.lannyl.com

[LannyL]

"R. C. White" > wrote in
:

> What does Disk Management tell you about your 60 GB drive? In the
> Graphical View, is it Disk 0, Disk 1, or some other number? Is it
> labeled "Online"? How many GB does it show as the capacity of the
> whole HD? Does any of this change if you plug or unplug your Firewire
> drive? (It would be safer to leave that drive unplugged until you get
> the 60 GB drive properly organized.)
>

Thanks a lot for trying to help...

It shows it as Disk 1. It is labelled "online" and "basic" and shows up
as one partition of 52.27. In the top frame it says that there are 11 GB
free.

Perhaps my previous message was a little confusing...this drive is a 60
GB which used to be the primary master drive of a desktop. The 80 GB
external firewire drive belongs to my laptop. When the 80 started going
bad, my plan was to copy the data to a drive on the desktop, put a new
drive in the firewire case, then copy the data back to the new drive in
the external case.

But when I went to install a new, larger drive in the desktop (so there
would be enough space to copy everything from the external drive, which
has roughly 60 GB of data). After partitioning the new drive using Max
Blast I was unable to access anything on the 60 GB drive, which now shows
that it's partition is no longer there, but the data seems to be still on
the drive. I wound up having to make the new drive the master and
installing windows on it just to get the computer to start. Now the old
60 GB drive with all the data on it is (apparently) connected properly as
the primary slave, but it has no drive letter, and I can't assign it one.
The only options that are available are "convert to dynamic drive" which
it won't let me do, and "delete partition", which I havent' tried. If I
delete the partition I'll lose all my data, correct?

L

--
_______________

"Language is so small, and ridiculously cumbersome, and stupid."
-J. Garcia

mail@lannyl dot com
www.lannyl.com

[R. C. White]

Hi, Lanny.

Sounds like Disk Management is confused about your 60 GB drive. :>( Let's
forget the 80 GB Firewire drive for now and concentrate on the 60.

> > What does Disk Management tell you about your 60 GB drive?

> It shows it as Disk 1. It is labelled "online" and "basic" and shows up
> as one partition of 52.27. In the top frame it says that there are 11 GB
> free.

OK. Except that you said it was supposed to be TWO partitions of about
20/40, didn't you?

> this drive is a 60
> GB which used to be the primary master drive of a desktop.

OK. That's how it got to be partitioned 20/40, right? That would be 20 GB
primary partition, which became the "system partition", and was labeled
Drive C:. The other 40 GB would be either a second primary partition, or an
extended partition containing a single 40 GB logical drive. Right so far?

> After partitioning the new drive using Max
> Blast I was unable to access anything on the 60 GB drive, which now shows
> that it's partition is no longer there, but the data seems to be still on
> the drive.

No reason that partitioning the new drive should have changed anything on
the old drive. Unless the old drive was plugged in at the time - perhaps in
the primary master slot - and MaxBlast got confused and did something to the
60 GB drive. That shouldn't happen, but it's good insurance to unplug all
drives except the one being formatted.

> I wound up having to make the new drive the master and
> installing windows on it just to get the computer to start.

Uh, oh! I hope you unplugged the old drive during this process. If WinXP
Setup finds an existing Active (bootable) partition (your OLD Drive C:), it
gets confused about which should be Drive C:. Often, the user is surprised
to learn that his big new primary drive's first partition is Drive F:, or
some other letter - and this situation is so hard to fix that most users
wind up starting over. They unplug the old drive completely until after the
new one has been completely partitioned and formatted and WinXP has been
installed on it. Then they plug in the old drive as slave or secondary and
use Disk Management to reorganize the old drive, probably including
repartitioning and reformatting.

> Now the old
> 60 GB drive with all the data on it is (apparently) connected properly as
> the primary slave, but it has no drive letter, and I can't assign it one.

Which is where we came in, right?

Nothing that we've seen so far should have resulted in this situation. I'm
wondering if your computer's BIOS is up to date and you have the current
proper drivers for your IDE controller and your HDs.

> The only options that are available are "convert to dynamic drive" which
> it won't let me do, and "delete partition", which I havent' tried.

Be sure you read all the information in the Help and Support file about
"dynamic drives". I've never tried them because the warnings sound so dire.
Mostly, it's a one-way conversion; you can't convert back FROM dynamic. The
only way back is the old faithful: backup; repartition?; reformat; restore.
Unless someone who DOES know about dynamic drives jumps in here to help, you
may be stuck with a half-converted volume which is not usable as either a
basic or a dynamic drive.

My guess is that somewhere in this aborted conversion to a dynamic drive is
the key to why WinXP now says the drive has only a single partition. :>(

You may have to give up on recovering your drive and its data by "normal"
techniques. In May, I lost a 25 GB volume with about 10 GB of data on it.
(I suspect a loose cable caused a momentary error; when Chkdsk tried to fix
the apparent error, the loose cable caused other false reads, causing Chkdsk
to write bad metadata, leaving the volume unusable, with the data
"unrecoverable".) I took the drive out of service for a couple of months,
until I found R-Studio (www.r-tt-com). I paid $80 to download this program
and with it was able to recover my missing data in an hour or two. I'm not
sure that it could rescue the data on your drive, but you might want to
check it out.

I'm sorry I don't have better news for you Lanny. Other readers might now
be reluctant to jump into this long thread. You might get a better answer
if you start a new thread. Don't let the new thread get sidetracked by the
new 160 GB drive or the 80 GB FireWire issues. Concentrate on finding out
what might have gone wrong in trying to convert your 60 GB drive from basic
to dynamic.

Good luck. I hope you find a better answer. If you do, be sure to post it
for the benefit of others who may find themselves with similar problems.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX

Microsoft Windows MVP

"LannyL" > wrote in message
...
> "R. C. White" > wrote in
> :
>
> > What does Disk Management tell you about your 60 GB drive? In the
> > Graphical View, is it Disk 0, Disk 1, or some other number? Is it
> > labeled "Online"? How many GB does it show as the capacity of the
> > whole HD? Does any of this change if you plug or unplug your Firewire
> > drive? (It would be safer to leave that drive unplugged until you get
> > the 60 GB drive properly organized.)
> >
>
> Thanks a lot for trying to help...
>
> It shows it as Disk 1. It is labelled "online" and "basic" and shows up
> as one partition of 52.27. In the top frame it says that there are 11 GB
> free.
>
> Perhaps my previous message was a little confusing...this drive is a 60
> GB which used to be the primary master drive of a desktop. The 80 GB
> external firewire drive belongs to my laptop. When the 80 started going
> bad, my plan was to copy the data to a drive on the desktop, put a new
> drive in the firewire case, then copy the data back to the new drive in
> the external case.
>
> But when I went to install a new, larger drive in the desktop (so there
> would be enough space to copy everything from the external drive, which
> has roughly 60 GB of data). After partitioning the new drive using Max
> Blast I was unable to access anything on the 60 GB drive, which now shows
> that it's partition is no longer there, but the data seems to be still on
> the drive. I wound up having to make the new drive the master and
> installing windows on it just to get the computer to start. Now the old
> 60 GB drive with all the data on it is (apparently) connected properly as
> the primary slave, but it has no drive letter, and I can't assign it one.
> The only options that are available are "convert to dynamic drive" which
> it won't let me do, and "delete partition", which I havent' tried. If I
> delete the partition I'll lose all my data, correct?
>
> L