Hard Drive Problem!!

I took a hard drive out of my old computer and put it in
my new one. On bootup XP said that something was notable
to be used about the hard drive. So it made a change to
it. Then I logged in, etc. Now my hard drive shows up as
20mbs large. And I have no way to access my files. It was
a 60g hard drive, and 30g's were used up. I don't want to
loose all of these files. Is there any way to fix this?

[Alvin A Brown]

Hello

Well you can not just take a hard drive form 1pc to another
and just install and expect it to work, ok MS did this for a reason
do the following but you may hurt your chances.

Do a repair install
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q315341&ID=KB;EN-US;Q315341



Alvin


wrote:

> I took a hard drive out of my old computer and put it in
> my new one. On bootup XP said that something was notable
> to be used about the hard drive. So it made a change to
> it. Then I logged in, etc. Now my hard drive shows up as
> 20mbs large. And I have no way to access my files. It was
> a 60g hard drive, and 30g's were used up. I don't want to
> loose all of these files. Is there any way to fix this?

[Howard Brazee]

On 9-Sep-2003, > wrote:

> I took a hard drive out of my old computer and put it in
> my new one. On bootup XP said that something was notable
> to be used about the hard drive. So it made a change to
> it. Then I logged in, etc. Now my hard drive shows up as
> 20mbs large. And I have no way to access my files. It was
> a 60g hard drive, and 30g's were used up. I don't want to
> loose all of these files. Is there any way to fix this?

I had this problem - but I was moving from a new computer to an old one that
didn't have a current of a bios. I solved it by buying an IDE controller card
that knew how to handle the bigger drive.

[Ron Martell]

> wrote:

>I took a hard drive out of my old computer and put it in
>my new one. On bootup XP said that something was notable
>to be used about the hard drive. So it made a change to
>it. Then I logged in, etc. Now my hard drive shows up as
>20mbs large. And I have no way to access my files. It was
>a 60g hard drive, and 30g's were used up. I don't want to
>loose all of these files. Is there any way to fix this?

This was an additional hard drive in the new computer, is that
correct?

If you connected it as a slave drive to the existing hard drive in the
new computer did you set the drive jumpers correctly on *both* hard
drives? Some hard drives use a different jumper setting for "stand
alone master drive" and for "master drive with slave present".

Were you using a BIOS overlay program with the hard drive in the old
computer - something such as Disk Manager, EZDrive or MaxBlast - so as
to allow you to use a hard drive larger than what the computer's BIOS
was designed to support? If so then you have a problem. You need
to remove that BIOS overlay software without destroying the data
contents, and that can be difficult if not impossible.

Or you can install the BIOS overlay software on your new machine
(something I would not want to do if there was any other option) and
that should allow you to access the old drive.

Good luck


Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much."