replacing hard disks problem?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Geoff Cox
  • Start date Start date
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Geoff Cox

Hello,

I recently replaced the 2 hard disk drives in my machine with 2 larger
drives. Today I wanted to temporarily replace the present D drive with
the old D drive to get some files from it, so I did the following.

1. I took out the top drive which for some reason I thought was the D
drive! (of course it was the C drive).

2. I put in its place the old D drive and booted up.

3. Of course it did not work.

4. Realising my mistake I took the old D drive from the top and used
it to replace the lower D drive and put the C drive back in.

5. When I booted up the C drive was seen as disk 0 and the old D drive
as disk 1 BUT it was described as unknown with 232.88GB unallocated.

Presumably any attempt to initialize it would destroy the files on
it?!

Any ideas please?!

Cheers

Geoff

PS I should add that some weeks ago after removing the drive which I
am calling the old D drive all I did was take it out and put it on a
shelf. They are SATA drives so no jumper problems possible.
 
Hello,

I recently replaced the 2 hard disk drives in my machine with 2 larger
drives. Today I wanted to temporarily replace the present D drive with
the old D drive to get some files from it, so I did the following.

1. I took out the top drive which for some reason I thought was the D
drive! (of course it was the C drive).

2. I put in its place the old D drive and booted up.

3. Of course it did not work.

4. Realising my mistake I took the old D drive from the top and used
it to replace the lower D drive and put the C drive back in.

5. When I booted up the C drive was seen as disk 0 and the old D drive
as disk 1 BUT it was described as unknown with 232.88GB unallocated.
Click to expand...

Is the old D Drive a basic or dynamic disk?
Presumably any attempt to initialize it would destroy the files on
it?!

Any ideas please?!
Click to expand...

Use a file recovery program.
 
"Put back the old D: drive to boot up" Since when is windows on D: By
default
windows installs to C: If the new hd(s) have xp installed to them,simply
recon-
nect the old hd (IDE),when starting pc,open BIOS,set new SATA hds as 1st
boot priority.By default,anytime you reconnect a hd,the BIOS will set to boot
to it 1st.
 
"Put back the old D: drive to boot up" Since when is windows on D: By
default
windows installs to C: If the new hd(s) have xp installed to them,simply
recon-
nect the old hd (IDE),when starting pc,open BIOS,set new SATA hds as 1st
boot priority.By default,anytime you reconnect a hd,the BIOS will set to boot
to it 1st.
Click to expand...

Hello,

Not sure what you mean - I didn't think that Windows was on the D
drive.

Cheers

Geoff
 
"Put back the old D: drive to boot up" Since when is windows on D: By
default
windows installs to C: If the new hd(s) have xp installed to them,simply
recon-
nect the old hd (IDE),when starting pc,open BIOS,set new SATA hds as 1st
boot priority.By default,anytime you reconnect a hd,the BIOS will set to boot
to it 1st.
Click to expand...

Just another thought.

Having got the PC back to the position where I have just one hard
drive connected - it boots up and has Windows XP Pro running OK.

I then add the old D drive and it is "unknown" and XP wants to
initialize it!

What next?!

Cheers

Geoff
 
"The Unknown status occurs when the boot sector for the volume is corrupted
(possibly due to a virus) and you can no longer access data on the volume."

Start | Help and Support
type "initialize disk" in the Search pane
Beneath "Overviews, Articles and Tutorials"
expand the link "Volume status descriptions"
Click " + Unknown "
Read the text, click on the "Troubleshooting" link.
Follow the Troubleshooting instructions

Steve
 
"The Unknown status occurs when the boot sector for the volume is corrupted
(possibly due to a virus) and you can no longer access data on the volume."

Start | Help and Support
type "initialize disk" in the Search pane
Beneath "Overviews, Articles and Tutorials"
expand the link "Volume status descriptions"
Click " + Unknown "
Read the text, click on the "Troubleshooting" link.
Follow the Troubleshooting instructions

Steve
Click to expand...

Steve,

Thanks for the above - I've had a read and the worrying thing is it
writes about a "new" disk! Mine isn't new and could I lose all the
data by initializing it?

Geoff
 
Thanks for the above - I've had a read and the worrying thing is it
writes about a "new" disk! Mine isn't new and could I lose all the
data by initializing it?

Geoff
Click to expand...


Geoff:
The bottom line in all this is that the system sees that secondary HDD as a
"virgin" disk having no accessible data. It's as if it was a brand-new HDD
that you just purchased - unpartitioned & unformatted.

From your description of events it's hard (if not impossible) to tell just
what happened when you inadvertently attempted to boot to that HDD. (We're
assuming that the drive just contained data and not an operating system).
Why the data on that disk (there *was* uncorrupted/potentially accessible
data on that disk, right?) would have been lost because of that incident is
a mystery.

You can try one or more so-called data recovery programs to try to resurrect
the data on that HDD, but you'll be very, very lucky if that's successful.
Most likely a data recovery service will be needed to recover the data.
Nearly needless to say that's a very expensive proposition and there's no
guarantee of data recovery even there.

Here's a sample of some of the available data recovery programs.

Recover Lost Data - http://www.stompsoft.com/recoverlostdata.html

Executive Software Undelete -http://www.undelete.com/undelete/undelete.asp

Scaven - http://pjwalczak.com/scaven/index.php

Ontrack Data Recovery - http://www.ontrack.com/

R-Tools Technology - http://www.r-tt.com/

BadCopy - http://www.jufsoft.com/badcopy/

CD Data Rescue - http://www.naltech.com/

PC Inspector File Recovery -
http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm

Active UNDELETE (http://www.active-undelete.com/)

Data Recovery Wizard (http://www.easeus.com/download.htm)

IRecover NTFS http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/irecover.htm

TestDisk - http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk (free)

File Scavenger - http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm

http://aumha.org/a/recover.php

Many, if not all, of these programs have demo versions available for
download.

One other thing...
It probably won't work but it's worth a shot...
If you have another PC available to you - install the problem HDD on that
machine and see if you can access it through that means.
Anna
 
Anna,

Many thanks for all the links. It is very odd because the hard disk
concerned was perfectly OK before this event. It had no OS on it.

I don't have a second PC at the moment but may get one soon!

Cheers

Geoff
 
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