Help! How can I convince XP my drive is alive?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Angelfood MacSpade
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A

Angelfood MacSpade

I've just had something bizarre happen to a 180GB WD disk which
Windows XP no longer thinks has a file system! This drive is composed
of a single NTFS partition (drive N:) and is about 50% full. Some of
that data is important to me.

Here's the sad tale. Yesterday I (re)formatted the drive using
PartitionMagic 8 set to 64K file clusters from 4K clusters - as
recommended by a PVR application (the drive is used primarily to store
video recordings). I restored my data to it from other drive locations
(unfortunately also erasing the duplicate data) and all appeared to be
fine. Today when I went to reboot the computer, shutdown appeared to
be stuck. This happens rarely but when it does I've had to resort to
pushing the reset button. When Windows started up, CHKDSK ran on
startup on Drive N: - it finished quickly and reported no errors.
However I can no longer access any data on N: Explorer says "N:\ is
not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable."
Disk Management lists N: drive as having a healthy status and 100%
free and having NO FILE SYSTEM!

However, PartitionMagic 8 sees N: as having no problems whatsoever;
approx 50% of it is free, and it has an NTFS file system. Error
checking the drive with PM8 finds no errors. Neither does CHKDSK.

Could changing the cluster size to 64K have had something to do with
this? I'm reasonably sure the data is still intact but I have no way
to access it. Can someone recommend a utility that can fix this error
or recover my data? TIA!
 
The good news is my data is intact. I have no trouble seeing it using
Active Partition Recovery or in an undelete program. The bad news is
these programs do not think there is any error at all so they can do
nothing to fix it. For example, Active Partition Recovery doesn't see
any deleted or damaged partition so it doesn't write anything to the
drive and XP continues to see the partition as empty with no file
system. Maybe I'm better off to format the drive and then use an
undelete utility. Yes, I'm confused...
 
The good news is my data is intact. I have no trouble seeing it using
Active Partition Recovery or in an undelete program. The bad news is
these programs do not think there is any error at all so they can do
nothing to fix it. For example, Active Partition Recovery doesn't see
any deleted or damaged partition so it doesn't write anything to the
drive and XP continues to see the partition as empty with no file
system. Maybe I'm better off to format the drive and then use an
undelete utility. Yes, I'm confused...
Click to expand...

So you just need to make XP think this is a new drive it hasn't seen
before. What I would try is to use regedit to go to the
HKLM\System\MountedDevices key. First export the key so you can import it
if there is a problem. Then find the value that corresponds to the messed
up drive and delete it. Then I'd shutdown, disconnect the drive, then
reboot once to make sure XP is still happy. Then reconnect the drive and
see if XP doesn't find it as a new drive and let you access it again.

I'm just guessing about this procedure though so it might not work.

BTW, unless your files on that drive are fragmented changing the cluster
size would only affect the slack space on the very tail end of each file.
 
So you just need to make XP think this is a new drive it hasn't seen
before. What I would try is to use regedit to go to the
HKLM\System\MountedDevices key. First export the key so you can import it
if there is a problem. Then find the value that corresponds to the messed
up drive and delete it. Then I'd shutdown, disconnect the drive, then
reboot once to make sure XP is still happy. Then reconnect the drive and
see if XP doesn't find it as a new drive and let you access it again.

I'm just guessing about this procedure though so it might not work.

BTW, unless your files on that drive are fragmented changing the cluster
size would only affect the slack space on the very tail end of each file.
Click to expand...

Thanks but before I got your message I recovered my data, reformatted
the drive in Disk Management using at first the quick format. All
appeared well (copied and read data from the drive) until I rebooted
and then XP again felt there was no file system on it. So I did a
complete format and hours later all appeared well again. Even survived
one reboot but on power off/on, XP detected no file system. So I gave
up and am getting a warranty replacement drive from WD. I still don't
know if it's really a bad drive or somewhere XP is corrupt but at
least it's very easy to deal with WD exchange service.
 
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