I am trying to move an 80gb WD hard rive from a Win98 system to a new XP system. I have a new 160gb Maxtor for the master drive, and want have the WD drive be the slave so I can access all of the data. I installed it and set the jumpers and started the computer up. Windows saw the drive, it was F: in My Computer, but when I clicked on it, it said this drive is not formatted, would you like to format now.

What do I need to do to get this drive running in the new system without losing any of my data?

Thanks in advance for any advice!

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I suspect the drive is still set to be an active partition and this can cause all sorts of confusion. I am not sure how to fix this with WinXP, normally you could use fdisk to make it inactive. Someone who knows more about WinXP will be along soon....

Hi.

This sounds remarkably similar to my HDD problem which as yet is still unresolved :(
http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=24168

I thought that a PC system will only allow one x active partition, in which case this shouldnt be the problem.

Out of curiosity, have you checked disk administrator in the control panel > administrative tools? You may perhaps have a 'foreign drive' in which case it just needs importing. Long shot but worth a look maybe.

I will watch this thread with interest!

Not beeing an expert by far I would suggest running partitionmagic to see which of your drives has what file system (ntfs - fat) and which are active / passive partitions. I think that a master ntfs drive can work with a slaved fat, but not the other way around (though I might be wrong). Anyway, the info would be helpfull...

OK, I go into Admin Tools>Computer Management>Storage>Disk Management

Listed second it has Disk 1/Basic/31.50GB/Online
Healthy

When you try to do anything with it thought, it says it is not formatted. It is actually an 80 GB drive. In the old Win98 machine I was some driver (EZ Drive or something like that I believe) so the computer could see the whole 80 GB. Would I need to install that on the new machine to access the data?

Thanks again!

If you were using EZBIOS for the drive, it is formatted in a whole other way from the norm. I don't know enough about it to advise you, but I suspect your best bet would be to put it back where it was and back it up there. Here is a Google link about EZ BIOS (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Ez+bios&btnG=Google+Search) to check and see if anyone else has had a similar problem to the one you have now....

i removed ezbios from the drive. I unhooked the primary drive and moved this drive to the master position and the bios saw it as 80 gb. I then removed ezbios. I put it back into slave position and restarted. The bios sees it as 31 gb again. I started windows, and everything behaves the same except that when I go into the admin tools>computer management it now says this disk is not initialized and asks if I want to initializr the disk.

Do I want to do this??? I'm getting a bad feeling that I am going to have a hard time getting my data off this drive.

Thanks again for the help!!

When you initialize a drive within NT, you alow it to write a " signature" to the drive so that it can determine it's size among other options. Mostly it's for file system/MBR layout-usually it's in prepaeration for a format of the drive. In this case, your best option would be to back up as much data as possible with your older system , cause once you initialize it-XP is gonna wwant to partition/format it.



3rd party software on hard drives can be useful for tri or quad boots, but if you only have 1 OS or just dual boot, i don't suggest using it; you can see for youself some the problems you've just encountered.