harddrive reads as local cd type fat32not detected

[williamashley03]

My harddrive is reading as a local drive not reading in mycomuter right although it shows the hardrive size in computer management however it does not show that it is fat 32. It is unable to be accessed or scan disked when it is it asks to be formated. it reads fine in dos though. It does not read as fat 32 it just isnt reading as a harddrive however it bios detects it and dos it can be used, in xp it reads the drive stype st... it reads the size xxgb however it does not read the fat32 it is the seconadary drive the primary drive reads all of its fat32 partitions fine, secondary no go. It says it is working fine healthy and active and online. It was working ok for quite some time prior to this with the same os and hardware, there have been no driver changes that I know of. Then all of a sudden not working and asking me to format it however when I change the ddriver letter it reports as an error.My system has a history of being attacked with quite abit of malicious traffic the last week or so.Does anyone know how to fix the harddrive issue and secondarily does any one have suggestions for stopping this happening in the future. Thankyou for reading and any ddvice you may have. William Ashley

 

[wolluf]

Does it contain just one primary partition? Did it originally come from elsewhere (eg, an old win98 system) - & did you format it from your current XP installation? (XP can be funny about partitions from elsewhere - but odd as you've had it working). What sort of malicious traffic - has anything else been affected?

As to fixing it - if you can backup data you need from dos (is that from a boot floppy - what filestore is primary drive?) or by moounting drive as slave in another system - I'd do that, then wipe the drive (using XP's disk management. If drive > 32GB I'd consider either using ntfs or creating more than one partition - XP can only create fat32 partitions up to 32Gb - but can use larger ones created elsewhere).