Stupid XP
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- surfito
just reinstalled xp.
and my second hardrive, were i have all my stuff, shows up, but wont open unless i format it.so i dont have acces to all my work unless i format the hardrive which ofcourse delite everything i have.
damn, how do you fix that.
- surfito0
i want a mac
- vena0
why? so your hd could be completely unrecoverable?
boot to a command prompt (press f8 a lot while your computer's booting) and run fixmbr on the drive in question. say yes when it gives you the stupid warning, and let me know if that helps.
- angelus350
When you say that it shows up, do you mean that it shows up in the Disk Management area or as a drive letter in My Computer? If it's actually showing as a readable drive letter in My Computer then the file system is seeing it successfully. What is the exact error that you're getting?
- surfito0
yes it shows on my computer, but when i click on it it asks me to format the drive.
im gonna go try what vena said.
- surfito0
nope, didnt work.
- finnpimp0
how do you know you've still got all that stuff there if you can't access the drive?
xp managed to torch my hd a year ago... all work lost in a matter of seconds, completely unrecoverable by anyone else than IBM. it didn't format the drive, it just, well, zapped it? :)
dunno, but I almost threw the crap down from the balcony.
- vena0
ok, you might need to initialize the drive. i believe this doesn't format the drive, but it should warn you if it will. right click my computer, select disc management. right click the drive in question, and select initialize.
it's also entirely possible that the IDE channel on your MB is failing, but for i'm assuming for now it might just be a filesystem quirk.
- finnpimp0
when I had the crash in question xp fucked up the ATA100 drivers, making the now trashed drive s-l-o-w, took maybe half an hour just to get open the properties on the drive.
then xp bluescreened and I was back to square one.
so, yes, you might be having an I/O problem. xp gets quirky, that's why I use w2k now..
- angelus350
Good thought Vena about initializing the drive.. Other than that, I wouldn't be to sure the data is there still anyway. Good luck.
- lnu0
Or... if all your work is in there, go see a pro.
- motivdesign0
Also, check your cables. If you're chaining drives that use UDMA, you need to have 80 pin shielded IDE cable instead of the normal 40 pin, and the order that you place the drives on the chain is very important. If your drives support a cable select or "CS" mode via jumper, then try setting both drives to CS and booting up. If your box tries to boot from the wrong drive, then swap their places on the IDE chain and try again.
A lot of times this is the cause of the problem you're describing.
- artboy0
If you have a Win98 boot floppy around (and a floppy drive), you could try to boot from that & check your data that way.
I used to keep a 98 boot floppy and a drive specifically for situations like that.
XP defaults (I believe) to the NTFS file system on install; your data drive may still be Fat32, though that shouldn't make a difference; XP is supposed to be able to read/write both.
One more reason I still use 2k. And build my own PC's...
- k0na_an0k0
i have found that a hammer and tnt usually do the trick.
- the_user0
I've found that backing up all my important data before doing a major install usually does the trick.
- ********0
i dont think its XP, even in w2k it does the same (i think).
its how you installed ur os. did you partition you drive?i had to format when i switched os / installed a second one cause i didnt initialize the drives properaly.
- mitsu0
um, if your other drive is NTFS and XP is FAT32, then yeah, you'll have that problem
just set your drive that has the files you want as a master drive and back them up to a cd then copy them over to your new drive.
- rise0
i think he's right, i think fat32 is unable to r/w ntfs, but viceversa ntfs can r/w fat32.
- ********0
even with having two partition with fat32, once you install a new os, it wont read the old partition unless scpeify it.
- mitsu0
are we talking partitions or physical drives?
- ********0
i think he is talking about physical drive....