A lady brought me a HDD with two operating systems on it. SHe orginally had Windows 98 on it, and she tried installing XP as a dual boot config. After installing XP, she could not boot from it again. She gave me the hard disk, and wanted me just to pull all of her Word files off of it for her. I have installed the drive in a Windows 98 machine, set it to be slave, and set the jumpers on my drive to run as Master with Slave. My machine boots up fine, and I can see the second HDD in the device manager, but there is no drive letter assigned to it. I cannot access it through Windows or DOS. I tried it on a XP machine and had the same results, I can see the disk in Disk Management, but cannot access it. Any ideas? Thanks !
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Can't access 2nd HDD 1
- Thread starter cisscott
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I'll take a guess the drive was formatted with NTFS, hence Windows 98 can't use it at all. You don't say whether XP assigns a letter or not. Assuming so, you probably have to take ownership of the files:
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I'm guessing since she tried installing XP onto a drive for dual OS, that the FAT32 file system would still be intact. SHe can't tell me anythign about how she went about the installation, so I don't know what file system options she chose during the install of XP. QUestion.. How would I take ownership of the files if I cannot access the drive at all? I appreciate your response.
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Disk management in XP showed the drive online with 14.3gb available, but still did not give it a drive letter. I'm still trying to access the drive in the 98 machine, since I belive the file system would be FAT32. I would be happy if I could just pry it open from a DOS prompt and take all of the .doc files off of it.
Do any partitions show up under Disk Management?
Still sounds as if the MBR is hosed. I wonder if some Data Recovery programs would show anything?
PC File Inspector is free:
Free limited demos here:
Still sounds as if the MBR is hosed. I wonder if some Data Recovery programs would show anything?
PC File Inspector is free:
Free limited demos here:
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yea, I tried that.. I also ran the powermax tests on it, which it passed with perfect scores, but I still cannot use it. After I used fdisk /mbr, it showed that the mbr was restored. It did not show an active partition, so I created C: as the partition for the whole disk, and made it active. Still no luck. Cant boot from it, and it does not get a drive letter in either XP or 98. GRRR
Disk didn't have Goback installed on it? (that's a common cause of preventing disks being seen when connected as slave - think it changes the partition table). Think you need goback installed on the host system to be able to read such disks.
If you've also partitioned it with fdisk now, think your only chance would be a data recovery app.
If you've also partitioned it with fdisk now, think your only chance would be a data recovery app.
If you have repartitioned the drive and haven't formatted or written to the drive, you might have luck with recovering the files using Tiramisu. I have used it on a newly repartitioned drive in the past and had great success with it.
Dennis H.
Dennis H.
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Garebo:
I have tried the jumpers in slave mode, tried to boot from the drive with it in master mode, and cable select, and I have tried it as slave in cable select.
Freestone,
Yea, I tried one, but still want to try the other you posted. The first one showed a good active partition after I fdisk'd it, but I still was unable to access the drive.
Wolluf:
good suggestion, I have no way of knowing if goback was on it. The girl isnt totally aware of the content of the drive, other than Windows and her documents. Shes not even positive if they are .doc.
Lideho:
Thanks for the suggestion, I'll try the tiramisu app next.
I have tried the jumpers in slave mode, tried to boot from the drive with it in master mode, and cable select, and I have tried it as slave in cable select.
Freestone,
Yea, I tried one, but still want to try the other you posted. The first one showed a good active partition after I fdisk'd it, but I still was unable to access the drive.
Wolluf:
good suggestion, I have no way of knowing if goback was on it. The girl isnt totally aware of the content of the drive, other than Windows and her documents. Shes not even positive if they are .doc.
Lideho:
Thanks for the suggestion, I'll try the tiramisu app next.
The reason i mentioned the hard drive jumpers is that some hard drive, western digital, for instance, have many different jumper settings. There is a jumper setting for a western digital if it is the only hard drive on the one ide cable, another jumper setting if there is a second western digital hard drive, another setting if there is a hard drive made by another mfgr, etc. You didnt mention what make and model hard drive, so i am throwing this out as possibly something to have a look at to make sure you have the proper jumper setting on the hard drive. You sometimes even have to change the jumper setting on the primary hard drive if you add another hard drive as secondary, as in the case of western digital.
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WOOHOO ! Done. Freestone's link to PC Inspector File Recovery ended up being the ticket. I finally just did a quick format on the disk which allowed me to get a drive letter to it in Windows XP Disk management. THen PC Inspector File Recovery allowed me to recover some of the files. Thanks for everyone's help ! Thanks for the link Freestone. Scott F.
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