JEM

Righto, I need help from some Windows 2000/XP Gurus.

I had this prob a while ago and thought it was all ok after buying a new HHD (its my secondary drive).

Primary Master is a Quantum Fireball - 8GIG

Secondary Master is a Seagate - 40GIG

Both are (were) NTFS partitions.

The problem is XP thinks my secondary disk (40giger) is only 1gig and has 500 meg free and is a FAT partition.

Disk Management knows its 40gig but says most of it is unallocated. The thing is, what it thinks it is, was an old drive that was in the system occasionally, even has the same volume label.

So how do I get the partition info back for the 40giger without losing the data I had on it, remember it was working fine, I had installed things on it etc...

Any Ideas????

HSE2

This exact same thing happen to a guy I work with. The only way he could get the info back was via dos. Had a hell of a go and replaced the HDD over it. I think he swapped the HDDs over to make his small one the master then loaded it back up with Xp.

Not real sure of the issues or problems as it is mostly above me.

he talked of an option other than FAT that XP gives you causing problems and the program he used to partition got a serve as well. In the end the pc didn't see the partitiions

JEM

This is definately a software issue.

I'm pretty sure its a stuff up in the registry.

Aussiblue

Ask the question at Virtual Dr here:http://discussions.virtualdr.com/cgi...er=5&SUBMIT=Go

and you will get a solution. You'll also find me there under the same name but mainly in the W98SE forum as I don't think I know enough about XP yet.

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Sierra

Jem,

When you first installed the 40 Gb drive, did the CMOS at POST recognise the full 40 GB?
Also when you first installed the 40 Gb drive, how did you go about partitioning and formatting it? Did you partition all 40 Gb .... did you format it as FAT or NTFS? ie: how did you prepare the drive before you put data on it?

What sort of IDE controllers does your motherboard have? Other than the normal ATA-33 interface do you also have ATA-66/100/133 onboard controllers?
XP does sometimes does have driver issues with these high speed controller chips.

Did you check Microsoft's Hardware Compatibility List to ensure all your hardware will run with XP before you installed it?


Sorry about the 20 questions but it helps to have as much background info as possible.

Bloody computers :s5 :s5


Alan

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jaytyn

how was the disk partitioned?

You may have used an old version of fdisk or mistakenly partitioned it to 1gb.

You will need to use disk management or fdisk to partition the remaining amount of space, then format it.

If you do it this way, it will show up as a seperate drive letter.

To get all the space on one big drive, you will need to remove the partition and create a new one.

this could be a problem if you are using it as your boot disk with the OS,, in this case you will need to do it from DOS using Fdisk and re-install everything.

Jase_ELXR8

You dont have to install your secondary drive in the cmos because XP should still pick it up. Have a look at a program called DISKPART. You need to goto a dos prompt within XP and type that. You can convert to ntfs from there and also extend the volume to the full 40gb

JEM

Thanks guys for all your input.

I'll try and explain it in a little more detail without confusing the situation.

BIOS picks up the 40gig drive ok. I then initialized the drive in Disk Management, then formatted using NTFS. This was my D:\ drive. My DVD/CDROM is my E:\ drive.

This configuration worked for sometime. The problem seems to happen when I disconnect the CDROM to "temporarily" connect a 3rd harddisk for data transfer etc.

ok, get rid of 3rd drive, reconnect CDROM, bootup, and my d:\ drive is knackered. XP thinks its the 3rd drive, partition info, volume label, size etc.

HSE2

If you had a choice between NTFS and fat something this is the exact same problem the guy I was talking about had. I remember thinking need for speed to an abreviation

Sierra

What I was asking was if the BIOS recognised the drive as 40 Gb.
On older motherboards the BIOS may not recognise the full capacity of a drive that size.

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