SATA drive not getting drive letter in XP 1

[decaman]

I am trying to get windows to see this new sata drive on xp box. drive is there, has data because it was once connected before, all cables and connections are good. adaptec sata host controller (pci card) is installed and recognized. windows will NOT recognize the drive or give it a drive letter designation. in disk manager, it shows the drive, the volume, and calls it a "dynamic disk" and is unreadable. see the notes below.

many, many kind thanks for your help on this hair-puller.

oh, yes, i have searched many, many threads on many forums. believe me, i wouldnt be here posting this situation if i could find the answer.
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1. This is an OEM drive, Samsung SP1213C SATA 120gb.

2. The first time I tried to install the drive, I had a similar experience -- Windows essentially know it's there but does not assign it a drive letter.

3. After much futzing around, involving cable swaps, driver updates, sata host controller driver re-installs, windows tweaks, jumper settings, BIOS upgrades, etc, not much happened. Then, one day, the drive appeared and had a drive letter (H. Seriously. :| :?

4. I proceeded to use it for a few months, putting music and pictures on it, mainly. I was able to access it fine. I shutdown/restarted many times.

5. A month ago I disconnected the drive while it and e/t else was powered down. I went out of town for a week. I came back. I put the drive back in, and Windows saw it, no problem. I continued to put data on it.

6. Last Thursday Windows stop recognizing the drive for some reason, but the drive is still "there". Here's how I know:


a. Disk Manager shows the drive as Dynamic Unreadable:

http://lucky.phpwebhosting.com/~dilgil/dg/dm.bmp

b. SysInfo shows the drive as existant (it's the 111 GB drive):

http://lucky.phpwebhosting.com/~dilgil/dg/system info.bmp

I dont remember doing anything drastic. While I was moving data I happened to delete a user (not admin -- just a basic user) profile that i didnt need anymore. that's the ONLY thing i can remember doing that was system related.

So, what do you think happened? I am at wit's end. I've checked many forums for similar problems but can't find an answer. Admittedly, i AM a moron. One guy with a very similar issue used a partition repair program with success. DO you think I have a problem like that? Corrupted partition tables?

I think that's the best summary i can give, but im sure i've forgotton something. Any help or ideas any of you could offer would be so appreciated, that i would likely push everlasting good karma your way.

thank you, again.

 

[rvnguy]

decaman,

As you have done..the drive seems to be there while the data is not being recognized at all.

Have you attempted to use scandisk, or the Samsung software to verify the "health" of the drive?? Try to do this as it could be a corrupt table or something eaisly repairable....saving the current data.

rvnguy



"I know everything..I just can't remember it all

 

[dkeaston]

Hi decaman,

It sounds like the dynamic disk database has been corrupted. Running a partition repair program should fix the issue. I avoid dynamic disks on my pc at home, simply because I like to keep things simple. I have included an excerpt from Microsoft's website that gives the more techy details (if you are interested):
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"Unreadable"

The Unreadable status occurs when the disk is not accessible for the following reasons:

* The disk is spinning up.
* The disk might have experienced hardware failure, corruption, or I/O errors.
* The disk's copy of the dynamic disk database might be corrupted.

An error icon appears on disks that display the Unreadable status. Both dynamic and basic disks display the Unreadable status.

Disks might display the Unreadable status while they are spinning up or when Disk Management is rescanning all the disks on the system. In some cases, an unreadable disk has failed and is not recoverable. For dynamic disks, the Unreadable status usually results from corruption or I/O errors on part of the disk, rather than failure of the entire disk. You can rescan the disks (by using the Rescan Disks command on the Action menu in Disk Management) or restart the computer to see if the disk status changes."
-----------------------------------------------
You can read the whole thing at:

http://tinyurl.com/cw8cs

Good luck!

 

[decaman]

thank you both for answering my post. both suggestions are very helpful.

the drive didnt come with any software, barebones oem it is, so dont have much to scan it.

i am strongly believing that there is some kind of corruption to the tables or something like this -- i cant think of what else might do it.

do either of you know if repairing the tables with a program designed to do that would result in any lost data?

again, my thanks for your assistance.

btw, i just bought a 200GB ide drive so that when i get home i can do any kind of data retrieval, if needed, and have a place to put it.

 

[dkeaston]

The data should be ok. I say should, because the more someone fiddles with a drive, the more chances data can be overwritten. I doubt this is the problem in your case, but I just wanted to remind you of this.

Good luck!

 

[rvnguy]

decaman,

Xp has "chkdsk" and "scandisk" included try chkdsk if errors are reported run it as chkdsk /r to repair. Or you can try the Samsung site for their utilities.

Samsung Diag

http://www.samsung.com/Products/HardDiskDrive/utilities/shdiag.htm

Samsung Index

http://www.samsung.com/search/searc...col=wu+ws+download&tabpage=1&radio=1&select=0

rvnguy

"I know everything..I just can't remember it all

 

[decaman]

thank you all very much. i think it's always good to round off a thread of posts with what actually worked in the end. too often the solution disappears b/c the problem has been fixed and the user sees no need to return.

so out of respect for your great help and your time, here's what happened, in the end:

after much deduction, i believe something was amiss with the partition tables. something was corrupted. given the drive's Dynamic Unreadable Unrecognized status, this proved to be quite a situation to remedy.

i came to this diagnosis after thoroughly checking out the many potential problem areas (drivers, driver updates, cable swapouts, host controller card conflicts, windows settings, hardware settings, etc.) to be aware of when installing these new sata drives. i worked through every single thing to the best of my ability. nothing seemed to work, and the errors i was experiencing told me there was some kind of structural problem on the drive itself.

i also consulted many experts, both profession and friends. and you nice folks. nothing definitive came out of fixing or reestablishing the connection itself, and i was met with the growing concern that the data was at risk. it seemed like drive failure was in fact a nasty possibility. either way, true fact or not, it didnt matter. you gotta play on the safe side if you havent fixed the problem and you cant get to your data, right?

so, i began to look into recovery options. i acquired a licensed copy of OnTrack Easy Recovery from a friend. It's regarded as the best out there, and I could not get it to work.

I also tried full-functioning demos of many types, but for the majority of these, they would not deal with a dynamic disk whose status was "unreadable". Or I had problems reconstructing the drive image.

i was ready to cry myself to sleep, but then...

i came across a program called Active Undelete. AU scanned the comp for all available data storage. It DID see the SATA in question. It gave me the option of doing a deep scan on it, which was extremely encouraging. It was actually reading the drive. At the end, a "Recover Files To" box appeared. I was overjoyed. I gave it the destination, copied the files over (i lost NO data) to another drive, and am set.

I thought you all should know what ultimately happened, as I very much appreciate your help, time, and suggestions.

I also highly recommend this inexpensive program (like 40 bucks, maybe?). It worked fabulously for me, and I can imagine it would be pretty handy to have around.

Thanks again, to all of you.