The Mysterious Unformatted Hardrive Prob.

[Yokaze1]

I have two hard drives, one is my master boot drive (60 gigs) and the other is my slave storage drive (160 gigs) I recently had to replace the old hard drive due to a fatal crash. I installed the new hard drive (a 60 gig, both hard drives are maxtor brand) then reinstalled my OS (XP Pro) However, after the OS set up finished, I couldn't access my 160 gig hard drive. When I try, it tells me that it is unformatted. Is there any way to fix this without formating it, and losing all the files I had backed up on it??

Thanks for your time

~Scott

 

[Kage]

Hi,

I can only think of one thing that might be causing the problem, but it might not be the problem at all.

What did you format the new drive as? FAT32 or NTFS? It should give you an option when formatting... or there should be something you have to type when formatting. Can anyone help with this?

The thing is, NTFS formatted drives can read FAT32 drives, but FAT32 drives cannot see NTFS drives because its a new method.

NTFS is the better one to use, since it has extra protection and privacy settings, yet if the 160GB drive is FAT32, format the new drive (60gb)in this too and it might recognise it.

That is the only thing I can think of, and its definetly worth a try. There can't be anything wrong with the 160GB drive if it was working perfectly before you got the new 60GB drive

Hope this helps
*KaGe*

 

[jack22]

He saud that he wanted to know if there was a way to format it without losing the files. I say you just put the HDD in another computer and save them too disks. You should have done this before.....

 

[Kage]

Oh... but he said that he had two drives. The 160GB one he doesn't want to lose data on. The other one is the 60gb one which is the one witrh just windows on it. I thought he didn't want to lose the 160GB one, and is why I said to format the 60GB one in another format... hehe

*KaGe*