Disk is not Formatted....

[David Barker]

I have a Raid 0 setup for my operating system, C:\Windows
and a Western 120 Gig Hard drive I use for backup on IDE
0. Everything has been normal for months but when I tried
to do a backup this week, Windows XP professional now
shows the backup drive, but when I try to access it, it
says "Drive is not Formatted". When I go to the Command
window, I can access the drive and read the files using
DOS commands but from the windows explorer I get the
error message. I went ahead and tried to reformat it both
from the disk manager and the recovery console, but I
still get the same problem. The C:\ drive is FAT 32 and
the Backup drive is NTFS. Does anyone have any ideas??

 

[Paul]

That makes no sense. XP loads file system drivers so it can read both NTFS and
FAT32 file systems.

Granted, I would go ahead and convert the C: drive to NTFS but not because it
will help David's problem at all. Since he has XP Pro, he will gain security
features that FAT32 cannot provide.

As far as what his problem resolution is, it is possible he has a virus in the
MBR of the second drive. But this is only a WAG....

Paul

 

[Earl F. Parrish]

FAT32 can't read ntfs,ntfs can read FAT.Try converting
C: to ntfs from recovery cmd,CONVERT C: /FS:NTFS

The operating system reads the drives. The drives do not read each
other. Windows XP can read FAT12, FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS which
covers most of the type file systems used in Windows and MS-DOS.