HDD says disk not formatted..working before til reinstalling genuine x

[yepacino]

hi to each and everyone! last night i went to my friends house to fix his computer. the problem was IE keeps hanging up after browsing 4 different websites. i ask him if he's using a genuine he said no. so i had a newly bought winxp genuine went to reinstall but i just clicked R to repair it. repaired the OS with no problem but there was an error "wmacd v32 driver has not passed windows logo testing..." i pressed no because i'm scared to impair his OS then it still continued copying files. then we were able to login then the wmacd was on the device manager and has a yellow question mark so i just reinstalled then was successfully installed. then went to my computer check all the drives all the drives were there but the drive g which was named as music before says disk not formatted...format now? we just click no coz there are lots of files in there.

on the other hand IE was doing great!

pls. anyone help me. he need those files to be recovered or be working just the way it was. THANKS!

by the way all the drives are in device manager and BIOS

 

[kestrel1]

If you do a clean install of the OS, you wont lose anything on the other drives/partitions. You only need to format the C: partition.
However, if the drive that the data is on is formatted as FAT32, any Windows system can read it (Win 98 upwards) If it is NTFS then you are restricted to using Win NT/2k/XP/2003server or Linux.
Anyway, use a clean install, this should sort out the problem.

 

[yepacino]

thanks for the reply. do you know how i can reformat the drive to fat32 without installing windows?

 

[kestrel1]

You can't convert an NTFS formated drive to FAT32, but you can go the other way.
What drive are you talking about?
If you are on about the drive that has the data that you want to keep, you wouldn't be able to do this without loosing the data. If you are talking about the C: partition that Windows XP is on, I wouldn't recommend using FAT32 & the only way would be to do it from a re-install, using a DOS boot disc or using third party software such as Partition magic.
If you want to retrieve the data you could use a Linux live CD, such as Puppy Linux & save the data to another drive before formating it. You should be aware that FAT32 restricts you to saving files that are less than 4GB, so if you have large video files or backup archives you could run in to trouble. You do not have this restriction with NTFS.
I suspect your best option would be to re-install XP on a clean partition, you should gain access to the files.
One last thing to try before a total wipe of the OS would be to boot from the XP CD & go to the recovery console. Log in to the XP OS & type 'chkdsk /r'
This may restore the files in the OS & allow access to your G: drive again. Worth a try. This operation can take a little while to complete, so don't be surprised. Also you may notice that the proceedure will get to about 75% & then drop back to 50%, this is normal.

 

[yepacino]

thank you so much for your help! i'll go try the chkdsk 1st before anything else.

 

[kestrel1]

Yeah, this may work & is always a good option before going totally mad. (as I am) lol

 

[BadBigBen]

It is possible that the Partition Table for said drive has gotten corrupted...

if you want to save the data on that drive, there are two ways to go about it...

1.) run a Data Recovery software, such as RECUVA or FileScav and save the found data to a FREE Partition... then FORMAT the said Drive and recopy the files...

2.) boot into the RECOVERY CONSOLE and do a FIXMBR \device\harddiskx (where the x is the drive you want to fix)... use the MAP command to find out what drive the Partition I: is on...

ie. lets say your system has 4 HDD's, the first hdd has partition C: and D: on it, the second HDD has E:, F: and H:, G: being the DVD/CDROM, the third HDD has I: only on it, and the fourth has J: on it... and you want to fix the MBR of the fourth HDD you would enter:

FIXMBR \device\harddisk4

or for the third drive in the system you would enter:

FIXMBR \device\harddisk3


Description of the Windows Recovery Console

http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb;en-us;314058

Ben

"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."

 

[yepacino]

ok thank you so much!