Vista and new "Unpartitioned" drive?

[Garfield3d]

This issue boggles me to the core and I'm afraid it might stump everyone else.

I have two hard drives (160GB SATA and 300 GB IDE). The 300GB is my media/games drive whereas my 160GB is where I keep the programs and OS.

Last night, after installing Vista onto the 160GB HD, the 300GB became listed as an unpartitioned, unformatted drive. The drive itself is listed on Device Manager, Windows Explorer, and whatnot correctly. Yet, whenever I try to explore or get into the 300 GB HD, Vista just tells me that the drive needs to be formatted.

To say the least, I am confused. I certainly don't want to reformat my 300GB drive since I would be losing a lot of information. For a moment, I thought maybe the drive might be damaged or the file structure was corrupted? However, it's a fairly new drive (7200.10) and I hadn't noticed any problems with the drive in the past, so I doubt that the drive itself is dying.

So far, I have checked the cables and replugged the IDE and power cords. Rebooting and scouring for some obscure Windows update hasn't magically solved the problem either.

Can anyone help me with some suggestions, even if they seem wildly out of the blue? I'm pretty desperate here. = /

--Garfield

 

[forsakenseraph]

You could try using a recovery program and then format the drive after you got everything off

 

[Skeeedunt]

Wow, that sucks. Hopefully the Vista install didn't format the other drive for some reason (haven't heard of that happening before). Can you download something like Knoppix or BartPE, boot off that, and see if you can see the files there?

If it was formatted, it was probably a quick format, which (I think) means that the files should still be there and might be recoverable. I'm not sure whether that would require a professional service at that point, or if you could download something that would do it (googling around a little indicates a lot of shareware programs that claim to recover files after a format). Not sure if this is even the problem though, either way good luck.

 

[Garfield3d]

Thanks for the responses guys. Seraph, can you suggest any free recovery programs?

Skeeedunt:
Thanks for the suggestions. Knoppix makes me a little uneasy since I'm afraid I have very little experience with Linux. BartPE looks promising, but that may be a project for when I have more time. I only have my original Windows XP CD w/o SP1 so I'll probably need to Slipstream that (which I've never actually done). I'm not sure if BartPE is the solution though. I can boot up just fine, but the drive just seems to have suddenly lost its file system. At this point, though, I'm desperate and I'll have to try BartPE sometime.

What puzzles me is that the drive shows up as "RAW." It's not even showing up as an empty "NTFS" file system, which is what I would have expected if I had accidentally hit the format button for that drive. I don't even know how it is possible to format a drive into a RAW drive. Does anyone know how that is accomplished?

--Garfield

 

[cmdrdredd]

Originally posted by: Garfield3d
Thanks for the responses guys. Seraph, can you suggest any free recovery programs?

Skeeedunt:
Thanks for the suggestions. Knoppix makes me a little uneasy since I'm afraid I have very little experience with Linux. BartPE looks promising, but that may be a project for when I have more time. I only have my original Windows XP CD w/o SP1 so I'll probably need to Slipstream that (which I've never actually done). I'm not sure if BartPE is the solution though. I can boot up just fine, but the drive just seems to have suddenly lost its file system. At this point, though, I'm desperate and I'll have to try BartPE sometime.

What puzzles me is that the drive shows up as "RAW." It's not even showing up as an empty "NTFS" file system, which is what I would have expected if I had accidentally hit the format button for that drive. I don't even know how it is possible to format a drive into a RAW drive. Does anyone know how that is accomplished?

--Garfield

This happened to me and it was an easy fix (in my case). Start up from the vista DVD and click the option that says repair my computer. Then run the utility for disk checking and repair (I don't remember the actual name off the top of my head). It will repair your drives and it made my vista boot drive go from an unreadable RAW format that wouldn't startup, to a working NTFS drive and Vista booted right up. It's worth a shot because like I said, my drive came up as RAW and the vista startup disk fixed it. I never formatted or deleted the partition either. One day it just decided to not startup so I booted into XP and it showed the drive as RAW, then I decided maybe vista needed to reinstall. I started up from the disk and on a whim I decided to try some of the repair features of the Vista DVD and the disk and boot repair utility worked and I lost nothing off the drive.

 

[NotQuiteAPCGuru]

I just did a Vista installation a few days ago. I mirrored everything over to a second drive and divided my primary drive into two partitions. If you delete a partition* it will show up as an unformatted raw drive. I guess it wipes the file system when you delete it w/o formatting.

Good luck. I hope everything turns out well for you.

*EDIT: Sorry, I meant if I delete the drive. Deleting the partition just shows unformatted free space, but if you're on a drive with only one partition to begin with, yeah, that will do it.

 

[69matrix69]

i had vista do the same to me. i had two 200 gig drives striped. one drive showed up not in array 9 days after i installed vista. i pulled the drive out of the pc sat it upright on its side and ran the seagate drive utility on it to test it before i sent it in for rma. the drive tested fine.


this puzzled me. made me go hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

so i plugged it back in and like magic, my array was back. now for the past 2 days i have rebooted 4 or 5 times with no issues. i think it was a bug in vista (with the partitioning software they have in it, as i found it odd that i didn't have to install a raid driver for my board. im debating on going back to xp. if the issue happens again im going back to xp as i never had any issues with that.