C Drive NTFS, D Drive FAT32 - Help 6

[KenWright]

Just upgraded a home laptop to XP. Laptop had a single hard drive partioned into C and D. OS is on C and C has now been converted to NTFS during the upgrade, and as such i can no longer see the D drive as it is FAT32. If I run Acronis Partion expert I can see the drive is there with data still on it and it tells me it is FAT32 (I assume that is why I can't see it), but how do I get to it.

Daughter apparently has homework on it she needs for the morning, and i'm now in her bad books - grrrr

Anyway i can convert it so I can see it and get to the data please.

Cheers
Ken..........

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[KenWright]

HAPPY ENDING:-

Many thanks to all, I think my problem stemmed from one of the times I shifted space between the two drives. I had tried shifting 0.25GB of space from C back to D just to see if that would jump start D again, but when the operation started it, for some reason it was going to move about 1.5 GB over. It's a small hard drive in the laptop and this would have encroached upon what was available for the OS, so I hit the cancel button. Cancel didn't work and it eventually died about halfway through.

Rebooted into the partion software and lo and behold in the manual settings was able to find an option to unhide the D drive, so did that and then rebooted the machine, at which point I think I realised that the failed space move had screwed up my C Drive.

what I did in the end was wake up early this morning, formatted the partition on C and then reinstalled a clean copy of XP. That worked fine and as soon as I booted up I was then able to see the missing unhidden D Drive. Homework was found and duly transferred to my desktop and is now available for printing, daughter is happy and I am tired but relieved ( and a little bit wiser about these things now hopefully :-> )

Very much appreciate all the pointers and advice, and am now going to settle down to sleep, oops, I mean a hard days work at the office.

I'll take my spreadsheets over your OS stuff any day of the week - Much less stressful

Cheers Guys
Ken..................

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[BionicJohn]

daughter is happy

I understand, believe me!

I'm delighted all is well. It was a close call.

LIVERPOOL FC - 5 times Champions of Europe. 1977, 1978, 1981, 1984, 2005.
Iechyd da! John
Glannau Mersi, Lloegr.

 

[Zelandakh]

Ken, you should have popped in to TTUK where the locals hang out. We could have resolved it in a sensible timeframe rather than awaiting the rise of the west coast.

I know you have stamina to stay up until 2.30am (Elephant and Castle ) but we could have helped all evening...

Pleased you got it done though.

 

[KenWright]

Hey Zel, I'm a muppet - Never even thought about TTUK :-(

It was a good learning experience though.

Cheers
Ken.......

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[BionicJohn]

rather than awaiting the rise of the west coast.

This west coast is in the same time zone!


LIVERPOOL FC - 5 times Champions of Europe. 1977, 1978, 1981, 1984, 2005.
Iechyd da! John
Glannau Mersi, Lloegr.

 

[AndrewTait]

Ken,

You have just learned the Server admins first rule - Always assume you need that data even if you think you don't!

Glad you got it sorted. I have only just read this tonight. I was on a very boring night shift that night, so had I been looking on the right thread, I would have helped. But hay! you got there in the end.

He's not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy (Monty Python's The Life of Brian)

 

[KenWright]

Hehehe - It carried on a bit after actually - I got the homework off which was the main thing, but later that day I went out to Microsofts updates site, ticked all the updates sat out there and just let them run. Rebooted the machine and got the BSOD - aaaggghhhh.

Blew it all away, reloaded XP again, turned on automatic updates and let it throw on the security ones, and am not putting any update that's not critical on the damn machine.

Regards
Ken.........

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[NRGeti]

I don't know if this will work for you but lately when I cannot boot Windows or it is loaded with viruses and doesn't work well, I just pull the hard drive out and plug it into another PC. If it is a SATA drive, you have to change the shorting block to make the drive a slave so it won't attempt to boot. If it is a SCSI drive, just be sure its logical address is different than the other devices on the new PC.

So far I have been able to read the drive and pull off files for backup. Then I put the drive back in the original machine and resume fixing it.

 

[KenWright]

That's generally what i've done to get data from a drive of a machine that doesn't want to play, and that's only because I haven't bothered to get myself a disk caddy, but I keep telling myself I'll get one given they are so damn cheap.

What I would like to know though, is how would i hook up a couple of laptops such that i can transfer data from one to the other. One laptop is a work one, so will not accept any USB devices that they haven't programmed into the poxy desklok app that controls it, and the other laptop I have full control over.

What I was thinking of was something like a Null modem cable I think, but faster, so can the same be done with ethernet cable and a crossover adapter or whatever?

I've got a CD Writer on each, so no hardship either way, but if I could just hook them up with a cable and see one from the other it would be great. I have a wireless network at home (Laptop number 2 connected wirelessly), and I can connect the work laptop to that via an ethernet cable (Wireless for work machine not allowed, and can be tracked - I can blitz the logs that track it but they can see that I've done that too :-< )

Last time I tried to connect my work laptop to my network at home and see folders on other machines on my network I used the wizard and ended up disconnecting the work laptop from my works network, and i really don't want to go there again

Regards
Ken.................

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[linney]

Both laptops would require installation of extra Network Cards if you go down the Crossover cable path (unless you have spares already installed?

If it was just a one off thing then your CD Writer might suffice, or if transfer speed is not too important there is always Remote Desktop to look at.

 

[KenWright]

Hi Linney, When you say *extra* network cards, I assume you mean besides the network cards that are already installed, ie I already have one in each machine? Hmmm, that's a thought though, as I just looked and I have space to slot in another on the side on each machine, and as they aren't USB related Desklok shouldn't have any impact on those. I have at least one spare network card that I could put in the work laptop.

If I pop in the spare to the work one, and get another spare to pop into the other one, how do I then set it up with a cable? Also, could I not just use the existing cards to do this then? I wouldn't need the laptops hooked up to my home network for any reason (that I know of) whilst transferring data, so those cards would not be in use as far as i can tell.

Not just a one off thing, but more just being able to when I feel like it without having to use disks. Just liked the idea of being able to browse one from the other and drag over files when I wanted to. Have started getting into watching telly progs on my laptop, and somne of them download at more than 700MB, so won't fit on a CD for transfer, and splitting them across multiple disks seems awfully tiresome

Regards
Ken.............

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[KenWright]

Had a couple of other pointers as to how to do this, so am going to play with both of these:-

1) Set up an FTP server on home laptop, and as long as both machines are connected to me network I should then be able to achieve what I need via Uploading/Downloading from the work laptop using IE.

2) Map one to the other via 'Map network Drive' option whilst both are connected to my newtork.

I shall have a play

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[KenWright]

Got there. Simply turned on File and printer sharing on the laptop that had the data I wanted, shared the drive I wanted to, and then mapped that drive onto the other laptop. Wouldn't connect at first, but when i couldn't ping it either, I switched off the firewall for a minute and lo and behold there it was. Switched the firewall back on, added the subnet to my firewall's trusted zones and it all works fine. Superfast transfers and a happy me

Cheers folks.

Regards
Ken.........

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