Hello.

Following a recent rebuild of my WinXP system i have a peculiar problem with one of the HDD's. btw, the pc was only rebuilt cos it hadnt been done in over a year & had got a little grumpy.
Anyway, the install went fine and all is up n running nice n smoothly again. Except for one of my HDD's. I many of them and no changes were made to any of the hardware. Its an IBM deskstar 120GB HDD. Its there in the devices, XP Disk Management & also when using pqmagic.

However everything tells me its not formatted any more?! (It was almost full of music & movies!!) It was NTFS & doesnt show up in my computer etc any more - no doubt on account of 'not being formatted'.

I have moved it to a different IDE channel just in case, no joy.
I have tried it in a different PC again no joy.
Thought about fdisking the MBR as I seem to remember that the MBR will be rebuilt when its next powered up? (not sure tho)
I can probably retrieve the data off the HDD except I dont have another HDD that size to put the retrived data onto so I would rather not have to do that!!

Can anyone think of an option that does not include formatting the HDD?

Following a recent rebuild of my WinXP systemWhat exactly did you do? Did you move that drive to a different spot on the IDEs?

Just because it's XP it might be suspecting you have "rebuilding" and trying to put the OS onto another system without notifying "Bill!"

And, "Bill" wants to know what you're up to...:rolleyes:

Also check out this post by Paul Komski.....it has a lot of info dealing with the oddities of the way XP handles partitions.

http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=22390

I am suspecting that the partition "remembers" the old install. If you have a nonNTFS (preferably a 9x system) computer available, try slaving this drive to it and see if you can access the data.

Nah It was a clean install.. All the HDD's were left in their original positions. XP went onto C again after deleting, re creating & formatting the partition with NTFS.
The missing one was originally G.. 2nd IDE & slave. Its NTFS so win9x wont read it. Although I have tried it in a win2k PC exactly same issue as on XP system. Maybe the HDD fat is corrupted? fixeable or not?

Oh btw about the only thing i can do with it at the moment is to assign it a different letter. How useful :p

It might be worthwhile to run the diagnostics from the drive manufacturer to make sure there isn't something wrong with the drive itself, although that seems like a longshot.

Sometimes those longshots pay off...I agree with Budfred...HDD diagnostics...if anything just for giggles! ;)

It's kinda one of those automobile metaphors...If the tranny is slipping check the fluid level before you start ripping the thing apart! :)

hehe very funny. A slipping tranny hrmmm will decline to comment. Obviously a tranny is something else in the US :p

Oh & I had a giggle & ran the diagnostic disk from IBM. No problems. Guess its time to bite the bullet & get out my data retrieval software :(

USA tranny = tranmission on a car
UK tranny = ????? If too obscene, just forget it......:D

I'm not sure about IBM but Western Digital has software to restore the MBR from a working copy stored on the HD.

Presuming that IBM has similar software, I would follow previous advice and run IBM's diagnostic software.

Thx for the comments.
Big Blue (IBM) isnt as helpful as Western Digital. Only the very minimum of tools on their disk.
Quick test, Thorough Test, Fitness Test, !! & a low level format.

I am currently 'squishing' up all my data so I have enough space to retrieve 120Gb back to. Likely to take me a while hmm :p

Thx again, Inka.