How to access a SATA drive on DOS???

[ImodiumAD]

I have a Windows XP Pro system w/SP1 (and several pre-SP2 patches) running on a Seagate 200GB ST3200822AS SATA drive. There are to DVD burners on IDE 1 and a single (and ancient) Maxtor DiamondMax 4320 (model 91080D5, 10GB) HDD on the IDE 2 as "master."

Up until ten minutes ago, WinXP could see the Maxtor fossil, but then I got some sort of system crash as I tried to view a directory in the Maxtor drive... I pressed the restart button, and when XP booted again, I noticed that the Maxtor is no longer listed in the Explorer window. Rebooted twice, and the Maxtor is still a no-show. The drive has been working fine since Wednesday....

Thing is, the sparkling new BIOS detects the HDD with no problem... WinXP, however, is still blind to it.

Now, the main reason I plugged the Maxtor was to move all the old files in it to the new HDD, and later burn them to a few DVDs and then store them...

My first idea was to say, boot into DOS and see if I could move the files to the SATA drive the old fashioned way... however, I noticed that I could not access the SATA drive neither by using the single boot floppy I made in XP, nor with the old Win98 CD I have around. Well, obviously Win98 is Jurassic and doesn't have the drivers needed for SATA, and the floppy lacks them as well... is there any way to boot into DOS *and* access the SATA drive as well?

I don't know if you people need my full system specs, but here they are just in case.

Board: ASUS A8N-SLI DELUXE 1.XX
Bus Clock: 200 megahertz
BIOS: Phoenix Technologies, Revision 1003 01/20/2005
Processor: Athlon64 3000+
Memory: CRUCIAL 1GB DDR400 (two 512MB sticks in dual-channel config.)
Video: Two NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT cards in SLI mode
Disks: The Seagate SATA I mentioned above
PS: Thermaltake W0023 Silent PurePower series 560W

The system is plugged to an APC SmartUps 700.

Ed.

 

[wolluf]

Is the SATA drive using NTFS filestore? A win98 boot floppy (or the XP boot floppy, which is a cut down ME boot floppy) should be able to access SATA drives - but you can't read/write ntfs from dos without third party drivers/software - which is probably reason you can't see SATA drive from dos.

But - go back one step. Is the 'ancient' drive still actually functional? When you boot from the boot floppy, can you read the drive from there? If you can't, try downloading Powermax from Maxtor's website and run its diagnostic against old drive. If you can, then you should also be able to from XP! Have you checked in disk management (run diskmgmt.msc - the partition on the drive may just have lost its drive letter assignment - you can create a new one from disk management). You could also try booting into XP's recovery console - though if XP can't see drive.... (

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307654)

 

[ImodiumAD]

Thanks for the reply... but I decided to pull out the old Maxtor and maybe check it later on another PC some other time. It was making my PC unstable... just a few minutes ago WinXP recognized it again, first showing a blue screen while it "checked for file consistency." When I tried to copy files from it to the SATA drive the PC crashed, restarted, got the blue screen again, etc. Normally, I would have tried your suggestion, but those unexpected crashes were a pain in the neck. Thanks, though.

BTW, the Maxtor was Fat32, my new SATA drive has NTFS... that shouldn't be a problem in and of itself, no?

About beng able to access the SATA drive while in pure DOS... well, I imagined that it wold be something like that... I can't even "see" the drive there. I'll see if I can find on the web how people are doing it... what drivers I need for that, etc.

 

[wolluf]

Did you run fdisk from the boot floppy? (just in enquiry mode - it should see the ntfs partition on the SATA drive as non-dos - but you won't be able to read it). As I said, you won't see an ntfs drive from dos - it just won't be there. You would need third party software (which costs -

http://www.sysinternals.com

have a free read only software - but the write version costs money - this is nothing to do with it being a SATA drive - the same would be true of an NTFS partitioned IDE drive).

If you want to retrieve data from the old drive - which is obviously failing, you'll need to connect it to a machine which it will be stable in long enough to do the job. I don't know what resources you have available, but for example, if you have a copy of ghost 2003 and a machine with a CD writer, you could try ghosting the drive to CD, booting from a ghost boot disk with CD writer support (but again, it would depend on stability of drive while ghost is working).