Second hard drive is no longer accessible

  • Thread starter Thread starter Alex
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A

Alex

Two harddrives: C: 6 GB
D: 80 GB

My previous operating system was Windows 98. I backed up
all my data files onto the D drive before doing a
complete install of Windows XP Pro onto drive C:

Now I can't access the D drive - it says "The disk in
drive D: is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?"

I can't remember if the D: is FAT32 or NTFS but C: has
always been FAT32.

Can someone please help me access my D: drive?
Alex
 
Alex said:
Two harddrives: C: 6 GB
D: 80 GB

My previous operating system was Windows 98. I backed up
all my data files onto the D drive before doing a
complete install of Windows XP Pro onto drive C:

Now I can't access the D drive - it says "The disk in
drive D: is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?"

I can't remember if the D: is FAT32 or NTFS but C: has
always been FAT32.

Can someone please help me access my D: drive?
Click to expand...

Not sure if this will help, but I had a problem with WinXP recognizing a
previously-used Win98SE HDD. Turns out that I had GoBack installed on the
Win98SE HDD, and by booting up in Win98SE with that HDD and disabling
GoBack, I was able to then get WinXP to recognize it.

So, you may be having problems with some type of drive overlay utility, such
as GoBack, Ghost, EZ-Drive, etc. on your old HDD that may be preventing XP
from recognizing it.

One other option is to use the HDD installation utility from the
manufacturer of your unrecognized HDD. If you used one of these to install
the HDD originally, then it may have used a utility like EZ-Drive to set up
the disk. There is usually an option for uninstalling EZ-Drive (or clone),
or rewriting/offsetting the Master Boot Record (MBR). Basically, you don't
want any third-party drive utilities on your HDD in this case.

If all that fails, you might try using FDISK /MBR on the old HDD. That
won't affect your data, but may make the HDD recognizable by XP.

Btw, I'm not an expert at any of this stuff..... :þ
 
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