XP Says HD Not Formatted, In DOS I See All Files?

[hpfanatic]

For some reason one of my ide hard drives now shows up as unformatted in Win XP. When I use a StartUp DOS Disk, all the files are there and I can access them. It is Fat32, and the partition shows as Active. How do I get Win XP to see it as it used to?

 

[mastertech01]

Whenever I have seen something like this suddenly occur when it was working fine before, it is usually a loose cable, either power cable or interface. Sometimes you can access via DOS, but once in a 32bit system thats when it gets lost. I cant explain why but thats the way it has worked for me. Its been things like one pin in the molex cable loose, or the interface cable partially pulled loose. Or possibly the one thing you dont want to hear.. a drive going bad. I would check power and interface cables for sure if there have been no major changes to software/hardware/bios settings.

 

[zigCorsair]

<< Whenever I have seen something like this suddenly occur when it was working fine before, it is usually a loose cable, either power cable or interface. Sometimes you can access via DOS, but once in a 32bit system thats when it gets lost. I cant explain why but thats the way it has worked for me. Its been things like one pin in the molex cable loose, or the interface cable partially pulled loose. Or possibly the one thing you dont want to hear.. a drive going bad. I would check power and interface cables for sure if there have been no major changes to software/hardware/bios settings. >>


agreed - did this fix your problem?

 

[hpfanatic]

No. I checked cables and even put in a new one with no difference. I tried it alone on the cable, and also as the only ide drive on both channels with no luck. All the pins are straight also. I am going to try it in another computer and see what it comes up as.

 

[zigCorsair]

<< Or possibly the one thing you dont want to hear.. a drive going bad. >>


Upon further reflection, I would guess it's not the drive going bad, since it does show up. Does it make pinging noises? I hope not.... Hehe, but all of mine do .

 

[yazz]

you are probably going to have to edit the drive and make sure your harddrive has the correct filesystem ID. you can use DiskProbe that is on the WIN2K/XP disc under support tools. if you cannot do that then i suggest you move those files off that harddrive to another harddrive that is Fat32 so you can do the transfer in WIN9X. once that is done boot to XP and delete and do a slow format of the harddrive. then move your data back. i have seen this problem before. dont worry you data is fine, just move it off before things get worse.

 

[Abzstrak]

I would sgguest running a scandisk under DOS to make sure the disk integrity is ok

 

[hpfanatic]

I put the drive into a Win98SE computer and it came up fine. I copied all the files off of it, then repartitioned the drive, formatted it and copied the files back onto it. Put it back into the XP machine and all is fine now.