HD treated as partition

After my n'th reinstall of XP, I have a stupid problem. I have a 40GB drive that is the boot drive, and a 15GB entirely seperate drive that is used for data storage (and the backup of all mu all my old data). Windows is regarding what should be drive D as a partition of C. I have been to the Computer management section and it is shown that way under the disc drive section. It would not I suppose matter too much except for the fact that Explorer does not read it or indeed show it, so the content is not accessible. I have tried under system/hardware removing each drive and both together, but it returns to the previous situation. Can anyone suggest how I might "unglue" these drives and be able to access both.

 

What does Disk Management say about the disks/partitions under the "˜Layout’ and "˜Type’ column headings? You haven’t converted to Dynamic disk or set up a spanned volume?

 

No XP is not on the 15GB drive. I have disconnected the 15GD drive and reinstalled windows, but when plugged in, the old situation returns! I have also tried uninstalling one drive and both drives on Device Manager, but this did nothing either.

On Disc management, Layout is partition and type is basic (as is drive C). By the way, the 40GB is NTFS whilst the 15 is Fat32, but I have been told that this should not be a problem. If I select the 15GB on Disc Management, the only task offered under Actions is Delete Partition. If I did, would this delete the contents?

If I cannot return the situation to normal, is there any software that would allow me to boot, say into DOS and copy the files in some way?

 

I’ve never seen anything like this. I’m thinking now that maybe it’s your motherboard set up and that you possibly have Raid0 configured for the two drives. Raid0 will merge two hard drives as a single volume and Disk Management will show just one hard drive. With two different size drives and two file systems then perhaps your situation is the result.

Does this sound possible? What motherboard do you have?

A mixture of NTFS and FAT on hard drives or partitions does not cause a problem. I have several of each on both my hard drives.

 

Its a Soltek kt400c. I have not made any changes to its setup as far as I know! My problem by the way is that the drive I cannot access is a backup of data made before I set about reinstalling on the boot drive! You know who's

 

Well it was a nice idea, but that model of that board does not include Raid
http://www.soltek.de/soltek/product/products_all.php?isbn_st=SL-KT400-C

Only other thing I can think of is going back to basics. Do you have the master/slave jumpers correct and are you using the correct plugs on the ribbon cables? Does the bios recognise the drives correctly? If it’s not set on Auto did you do an AutoDetect? During the POST screens press the Pause/Break key to stop the bootup so you have time to read the POST details, (Enter key to resume). I’ve never seen any of that cause what you are seeing, but I’m out of ideas.

Boot from the XP CD and enter the Recovery Console and use the DISKPART command and see what this says about the drives. This should tell you if it’s a bios or hardware problem, or a Windows problem.

Failing everything then ways to retrieve the data would be to connect the drive as a slave in another computer and burn things to CD. If that’s not an option then you will need a bootable CD. If the XP Recovery Console shows the drives correctly then you could use this to transfer files over to the 40gig. Never done it myself so can’t help.

You may need to remove the 40gig and leave the 15gig as sole hard drive and use a boot CD that lets you copy the files to another media or burn them to CD – I assume there is too much data to make floppy disks feasible? Do you have a Zip drive etc? With the right bootable CD you could burn your files to CD.

 

Thanks again for your help. Cables, jumper settings are all unchanged. I went into the recovery console as you suggested and used diskpart. The result was as follows:
39261MB disc 0 at id0 on bus 0 on APT1 [MBR]
c: partition 1 [NTFS] 39260MB (33370 MB free)
14324 MB disc 0 at id0 on bus 0 on APTi (MBR)
F: partition<data> fat32 14324 MB (11001 MB free)

Now if I type F: and DIR I can get a listing of the files and directories. Fine I thought, I will use xcopy to copy the lot across on to drive C, but I then found that it does not recognise that command, copy yes, but not xcopy! I have got an old win98 boot floppy but that will not recognise any of the drives. Have you any suggestions please on how I might do a copy?

 

If those DISKPART details are correct then it’s not a Windows problem. Both drives are listed as disk 0. Perhaps you have some motherboard fault.

Don’t know about xcopy. Is the Copy function not the one to use? Your XP partition is NTFS, so your options are limited to what can work with NTFS.

Most Linux live CDs have NTFS read support and will let you burn files to CD with their own include burning apps, or to a USB device
http://www.shockfamily.net/cedric/knoppix/
http://www.mepis.org

BartsPE will give you full NTFS read and write support. It does not have it’s own burning app, but Nero can be added with a plugin if you have your own copy of Nero Burning Rom. It does however have support for a USB device, including a Flash/Pen drive. This add-on to BartsPE will give you a burning app. http://www.ubcd4win.com BartsPE takes a bit of building, but well worth it if you can manage it. A great thing to have in your tool kit.

There is also
http://www.ntfs.com/products.htm
http://www.sysresccd.org/index.en.php


EDIT:- Almost as soon as I posted that I realised I goofed. Of course your 15gig drive is FAT32, so you don’t need NTFS support to move the files to CD or another media. Only if you wanted to copy them to the 40gig.

 

May be just a thought on my part but, what happened to D & E: ?

Are there CDROMS using them ?

I am also leaning toward a MB or Jumber setting problem.

BillyBob

 

Hard drive shown as partition

Yes, D and E are cd/dvd drives. Can anyone suggest how I can copy from repair console to drive C? I looked at the Linux sites, but the file size seems enormous. If this is the only way though I shall have to do it. Why is it that the Windows console is the only thing that will pick up the two drives, none of the dos applications will.

 

Sorry I can’t help with copying files from the Recovery Console.

You can’t see XP from DOS because it is on the NTFS file system. There are a few other apps that give NTFS support from DOS, but as you want to copy the files from the FAT drive to the NTFS drive you will need ‘write’ support. The only other ones I know of cost a bit of money.
http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/NtfsDos.html
http://pro.mount-everything.com/index.htm

The Linux live CDs are free, but NTFS write support is not native and has to be added with a plugin. I tried this a while ago with RedHat and it did work, but it was still a bit hit and miss then. Can’t guarantee that the plugin with Knoppix will perform well.

BartPE is by far your best option. You get a full Windows Explorer GUI and full NTFS read/write support. It may seem a little daunting to build, but it’s not really that bad if you just work your way through the instructions. In fact the build instruction for BartPE are a little easier to follow on the WUBCD site. If your XP CD already has at least SP1 included then you don’t need to do the Slipstreaming part.