[audi255]

ok bare with me i have 2 hard drives 1 40 gig with my operating system and games and programs my other hd is a 80 gig with my media, i refromated the 40 gig that has my operating system but before i did this
i unplugged the power to my 80 gig to make sure of no data loss
now that my 40 gig is formated and new and clean i plugged my 80 gig back in and now xp doesent see the data and even worse
it sees it as a 31 gig raw format any ideas how to get my info of my 80 gig

 

[Guest]

Welcome audi255..............

Does the bios recognize it as an 80gig?

 

[audi255]

thanks for the welcome.
its a dell computer sooo the bios is limited it doesnt have a area to check the size of my harddrive but it sees it as a wd(western digital)800 and soo its seeing the harddrive everything is connected the way it was before it stopped working soo i dont know whats going on.

 

[x5dr]

What OS? if XP, rt. click My computer, Manage, Disk management and does it show up?

 

[audi255]

ok i go into disk management and i see my 80 gig hd as a 31 gig drive. i set it active but my only other options are format and delete partition both causing data loss.

 

[effex]

NTFS

Your drive before was probably a FAT partitioned drive, need to make it an NTFS or vise-versa. Under a FAT file system it will be unable to see the NTFS data. This is most likely your issue, what it wants to do is reformat in the NTFS filesystem.

 

[audi255]

no the file system is raw. not fat or ntfs but it was ntfs before and nothing has changed thats why im confussed.

 

[effex]

raw?

I was kindof confused because I have never heard of a raw file system before. I went to do a search for raw file system and came up with this link.

http://www.computing.net/windowsnt/wwwboard/forum/21050.html

They pretty much say that the drive is not a raw partition, but the data is in raw format (Raw != file system... but indeed a specific format). I beleive this is most common in Unix. After verifying my search, the information I have found is that you need a program to convert the files from the raw format into ntfs. I found a link which may be helpful to you.

http://www.xtremepccentral.com/forums/archive/39/2002/12/3/366

Hope this resolves your issue.

 

[effex]

Unfortunate News

Found this information on Microsoft Tech Net:

https://www.microsoft.com/technet/a...l=/technet/archive/columns/inside/5-17-99.asp

Your first and most pressing question--what the hell is a RAW file system?--is easy enough to answer. It's simply a disk partition that has not been formatted with an NT file system, neither FAT nor NTFS.

As to the remainder of your problem, Mole feels that too much of the recipe is missing to cook up an entirely satisfactory answer. For instance, was the motherboard changed when going from the Pentium to the K6 processor? If so, there could very well be a problem with what Windows NT thinks is the disk controller and what is actually in the machine. This would cause problems in accessing the disk.

What's the fastest way to solve the problem? You may want to consider a complete re-install of the operating system, followed by a restore of data from the backup you performed prior to making the major hardware change. During the process of installing Windows NT, you will have the opportunity to format the drives to either FAT or NTFS.

One smart option for partitioning your hard disk is to create a smaller primary partition--say 2GB--using FAT, and to designate the rest of the hard drive NTFS. As you probably know, system boot files always reside on the primary partition. This way your boot up is fast, while the bulk of your files can enjoy the additional stability and security of NTFS. Note that with Windows NT 4.0, your hard drive may have only one or as many as four partitions. Going back to square one will let you customize your NT 4.0 installation for maximum performance.

Unfortunate News is that your data is probably unsalvagable. The only other possibility is that you could find out about this 'program' which can format your raw data to ntfs.

 

[idtent]

Your 80 gig hard drive had a boot overlay on it.

Something like ez-bios or Maxblaster.

If you used fdisk to set it active you may have destroyed the data.

Depending on the manufacturer, Western Digital has datalifeguard tools that will help you. Post again and I will explain a little more in detail how to recover your data if it is a western digital harddrive. Might be able to help if it is a maxtor also

 

[johnwill]

Re: NTFS

Your drive before was probably a FAT partitioned drive, need to make it an NTFS or vise-versa. Under a FAT file system it will be unable to see the NTFS data. This is most likely your issue, what it wants to do is reformat in the NTFS filesystem.

There is no issue in booting from a FAT or NTFS filesystem and reading a FAT or NTFS filesystem with either W2K or XP. I have a mixture of systems, some that dual boot to W98 or DOS and have a FAT boot partition, and some that just boot W2K or XP and have an NTFS boot partition. This in no way affects their ability to read FAT/FAT32/NTFS filesystems on other partitions or physical drives. I use drive drawers to swap data files around to the various systems, and those are sometimes formatted FAT (for access with Linux and W98), and NTFS if they'll only be accessed with 2K or XP. I've never had an issue, and I've been interchanging like this for years.

 

[effex]

slick

Those weren't my words, they were facts searched out on a microsoft site. Maybe you can do it, I personally have had an issue.

Good day!

 

[idtent]

If you make the 80 gig drive the master drive, then without a floppy or bootable cd, a menu should come up saying "Hit ctrl to boot from floppy, or spacebar to boot from floppy" Put a disk in after hitting the keys. If it is an ntfs partition a little trickier. If it is fat or fat32, you should be able to type c: then do a dir.

The raw format shows in xp because the bios did not translate correctly. A drive overlay was installed to help the bios use the full capacity of the drive. If you let the boot overlay load first, then follow the instructions, your data should still be there. If you have used fdisk and wrote the mbr to the disk, Western Digital tools will be able to restore a backup of the overlay from when it was installed. If you have formatted the drive forget that I posted this. Hope this helps.

 

[johnwill]

Re: slick

Those weren't my words, they were facts searched out on a microsoft site. Maybe you can do it, I personally have had an issue.

Good day!

I will guarantee you didn't find anything at www.microsoft.com that says that FAT and NTFS are incompatible with W2K or WXP, because even they aren't ignorant enough to say that.

 

[manylander]

Dynamic Slave Drive

Hi guys...

I am going crazy here too and the problem looks very similar. I had two hard drives under XP pro (80GB master, 120GB slave). Master with theOS was over cluttered so I copied my data to the slave and formatted the first 80GB with XP pro. Did not touch the slave...Now BIOS recognizes my second hard drive as a 120GB "dynamic disk" but XP can't read it. Disk manager sees it as "RAW" and I can not access my data... Only option it gives is to format but I say hell with that. Is there any way or program that I can use to reaccess my data? I will seriously appreciate any help, since I've been working on this for more than a week myself to no avail.

Thanks in advance!

Manylander...

 

[idtent]

Start a new thread under the right category.

This will get you more help.

Thanks

 

[kaneco_inc]

USE Partition Magic 8

I had a similar problem. My drive was reading as RAW file system and I was being asked to format it. It was FAT32 and I dont know what happened.
I ended up using Partition Magic 8 and I "Split" the partition that was giving me problems. It let me select all the files that I wanted to move to another partition. I selected all the files I wanted to move and after it was done... I was able to access the files in the new partition!!! Problem Fixed!!