Win2K NTFS drives not accessible in WinXP Pro w/ Promise PCI card 1

[drofnala]

Kudos to the one(s) who can solve this. I've been working on it for two days without success.

I had an HP Pavilion PC running Windows 2000 Professional with five HDDs in it. All drives except for the boot (Cdrive were NTFS. The PC was used as a server for storage on a home network. It was getting old and slow so I replaced it with a much faster (relative to the Pavilion) HP Vectra VLi8.

The two oldest drives (boot C: and D in the old PC are small and I don't care about them - they ran off the motherboard drive controller. The three newest drives are large and have data on them I wish to preserve. The old PC used a Maxtor (Promise) Ultra 133 TX2 IDE controller card to connect the newest drives. All of them are recent Maxtor HDDs capable of supporting UDMA 133 - one 80GB and two 120 GB drives.

The new PC (Vectra) already had a Seagate boot drive (about 13 GB) with WinXP Pro loaded on it. I installed one of the 120 GB Maxtor drives as slave to the Seagate boot drive and the system recognized it fine. I can access all of my old data on this drive on the Vectra.

I added the same Ultra 133 TX2 controller card to the Vectra and both BIOS and WinXP recognized the card after I supplied the driver. However, in WinXP's device manager, this card is located under "SCSI and RAID controllers" and not "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers." This was my first hint that this simple job was going to cause me serious trouble. However, there are other references online that stated that this might occur and that it was OK. In fact, the Maxtor manual for the controller card even states that the device will appear under "SCSI and RAID controllers," so I went with it.

Subsequent to installing the controller card and attaching the drives (either on separate channels as single drives - the controller card has two channels for up to four IDE devices - or on a single channel as master/slave, BIOS detected the drives correctly, by model number, as soon as the BIOS screen for the controller card came up. WinXP recognized them too, but incorrectly as SCSI drives. They appear in the WinXP device manager right next to the other two working drives, correctly listed by model number, but with "SCSI disk device" appended to their listing. These are IDE drives, not SCSI drives.

OK, so both the BIOS and WindowsXP can see the drives, but in XP, I cannot access them via Windows Explorer. Icons for them appear, but clicking on them yield a "X: is not accessible. Access is denied." error message. If I pull up the properties dialog boxes (from device manager) for each of these drives, they are reported as "working properly" along with a bunch of options typically available to SCSI HDDs. However, pulling up the properties dialog box from Windows Explorer for each of these drives yields the following information:

Type: Local Disk
File System: RAW

RAW? Yikes! Remember that these are NTFS drives originally from a Win2K Pro machine.

OK, so the next step was to go to the Logical Disk Manager in the Computer Management panel of Administrative Tools. The Logical Disk Manager recognizes all four drives for exactly what they are: NTFS drives each with a healthy status. However, pulling up the properties for the two drives on the controller card yields again the File System = RAW message. Bummer!

So, I was ready to blame the PCI controller card, but, just for grins, I swapped one of the PCI controller-connected drives (non-working) with the motherboard-connected drive (non-boot, slave, working) and, lo and behold, the status of the drives stayed the same. Now, the PCI controller-connected drive is working and the motherboard-connected drive doesn't work. So, it can't be the PCI IDE controller card!

Now I am really stumped. Luck of the draw as to which drives were connected where started me down the wrong trail. Now I don't know why two formerly just fine and working drives aren't recognized by the new computer. The ONLY thing remarkable about the two drives that don't work versus the one that does is that the two are almost completely full. The one that works has lots of free space on it.

After making the swap, the now-motherboard connected drive, formerly reported as a SCSI device, is no longer reported as such (probably because it's no longer on the "false SCSI" controller card), but it still doesn't work. I get the same error message ("X: is not accessible. Access is denied.") when trying to access it. The file system is still reported as "RAW."

MaxBlast3 software (which came with the latest HDD) was no help; it only wants to partition and format the drives (not an option when I want to save the data on them).

I'm all ears for your suggestions.

Thanks in advance...

 

[wolluf]

How were the drives partitioned/formatted originally? (by 2k or by Maxblast). Sometimes problems with partitions not created by windows if you move them between installations.

Workround suggestion which you may have already thought of.

Is the old machine still working? - Just wonder if you can shuffle the data round (you say you have a 120GB drive that is recognised with lots of space on it - could you back up what's on it elsewhere & remove its data so you could copy the other 120 drive to it in old machine. Then you can format the 'RAW' drive on the new machine & copy the data back. Then repeat for the 80GB drive.

 

[Lemon13]

your controler is recognized by xp as scsi device because xp communicates trough aspi drivers with the controller.(

http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/~aa571/aspi.htm)

did you try to aktivate the drive in disk manager?
right click the drive and assign a drive letter to it!

;-)

 

[drofnala]

wolluf and Lemon13 - thanks for your replies.

I am afraid that I'll have to take wolluf's suggestions. I've already broken down the old machine into it's component parts, but I've got another Win2K box that I can load the old drives in and start swapping data.

I may try, last resort, to get the ASPI drivers from Adaptec that Lemon13 has referred me to, just to see if that makes any difference.

I have also, since my original post, loaded Partition Magic 8 on the troublesome machine, but it has not helped. PM8 also sees the drives, labels them as NTFS drives, but cannot access the ones reported by WinXP as "RAW."

I am still quite stumped why one of the three works just fine. They were all formatted by Win2K Pro on the old machine. Sigh...

 

[TekTippy4U]

As Lemon13 said the controller card is an scsi device .
As wolluf asked - were the RAW data drives partitoned (not formatted) with other software?
Were the 2 120GB drive formatted as Dynamic Disks for speed?....how about the security settings on the files/folders on the drive.

TT4U

Notification:
These are just my thoughts....and should be carefully measured against other opinions.
Backup All Important Data/Docs

 

[Lemon13]

hi @drofnala,
the link to aspi should not mean replace the controller drivers with the adaptec ones, i thought it just might interest you how aspi works.

in dm, mark the not working disks and assign (another) drive letter to it. that should aktivate the drive and make it accesseble by explorer.

do you have the latest xp drivers for the controller card?

 

[drofnala]

Lemon: Thanks for the additional info. Actually, I tried changing drive letters to no effect. And I have tried every version of the controller driver possible, including one supplied by Maxtor and three different versions downloaded from Promise; changing drivers seemed to have no effect.

TT4U: All three drives were partitioned and formatted by Win2K Professional. None were formatted as dynamic drives. All three have sharing enabled. I'm stumped.

 

[wesabi]

I'm having a very similar problem to the one you describe...

I have two 80GB EIDE drives formmated using NTFS: one is partitioned into C: and D: - the second is used for my E: drive. After some problems with Windows XP, I decided to reformat my C drive and reinstalled XP. After reinstalling and loading up WinXP, it gave me the error message "D:\ is not accessible. Access is denied." and the same message on the E drive.

When I click the properties of the drive, it displays that they are NTFS drives correctly and it displays that they are performing correctly in all areas (BIOS, Device Manager, Disk Management, etc.). I'm stumped as well, so if you find something, please let me know as well (I'll be sure to let you know if I find anything).

 

[Freestone]

drofnala & wesabi - Does this help either of you?

How to take ownership of a file or folder in Windows XP

 

[jurgen36]

This is a pretty common trouble with the NTFS file system and the reason we do not use it at all on our machines. We also found that drives in NTFS are about 12 % slower in operation. If you have problems it is very hard to solve them. You might have lost your date, it has happened to us in similar circumstances, we had to get most of our data back by using recovery software. Good luck

Jurgen

 

[drofnala]

Freestone: Thanks for the tip. I'll give it try and let you know what happens. I don't have access to the machine in question for another 10 days or so, so expect another notification after that.

Jurgen: Yikes! So do you run FAT32 on everything?

 

[1Warlord]

Here's what I've done previously (long ago) when my drives ended up RAW file format. ~as he kicks the puter.

{System Config at time of incident}
ASUS A7V133 w/promise ATA100 on-board & WinXP Pro (NTFS)
-Main IDE-
C: Maxtor 20Gb (NTFS)
D: Maxtor 40Gb (NTFS)
E: Maxtor 120Gb (NTFS)
F: DVDRW

-Promise-
G: Western Digital 120Gb (NTFS)
H: Maxtor 160Gb (NTFS)
I: Maxtor 40Gb (NTFS)
J: CDRW

One day the C: drive decided to take a long vacation to Hell with no return. After receiving my replacement, I formatted the drive and re-installed WinXP (NTFS). My drive H: and I: somehow changed it's format to RAW??? - After long and painfull searches and remembered that NTFS cannot view RAW Table.. AHAAA! Grab old but still good puter (Win98SE) and installed needed files for "large drives". Once the drive H: and I: were installed... Taadaa!

It reads it perfectly and copied (took forever) onto borrowed (160Gb) drive in 98. Then FDISK'ed the affected drives and returned it into main system and re-formatted it again to NTFS. Also networked 98 and transfered info onto H; and did the same proceedure for the I: drive *phew*

I was very fortunate that I didn't lose one file (except the main C ~kicks it again~

Good luck and hopes that this helps you a little more with the right parts...

 

[1Warlord]

Forgot to mentioned that when was originally in XP, the system couldn't read the drives H: & I: - all it kept asking was "The drive is not formatted. Do you wish to format?" ~of course I've chosen "Hells NO"

-Type: Local Disk
-File System: RAW
-Used Space: 0 bytes
-Free Space: 0 bytes
-Capacity: 0 bytes

Good luck again
*mutters in the backqround "I'm going to kick this puter again!"*

 

[jurgen36]

:drofnala
Yes for all windows applications on XP we use fat32. We format our rather large drives with a Win98 boot disk and than install the files. Xp can not format fat 32 drives larger than 32 Mbytes, this seems to be a step backwards. Our main server runs in Sun Solarix Unix for security reasons. Regards

Jurgen

 

[TekTippy4U]

Hi jurgen36
Cool - gettin jiggy with the FAT
you can get an updated Fdisk here for Drives/partitions Larger than 64GB which the 98 version subtracts 64GB from when showing the size.
Yes XP has the 32GB limit....but unfortunately 98 fdisk has the 64GB bug
so;

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;263044&Product=w98

TT4U

Notification:
These are just my thoughts....and should be carefully measured against other opinions.
Backup All Important Data/Docs

 

[whiteriver]

I have experienced a similar problem. OS is Win2k professional. I added a Promise Ultra 133 TX2 controller to support a new Hitachi Deskstar 160 mb disk on older mother board, ASUS CUSL2. Before adding Promise controller I had two disks, both supported by motherboard. Boot disk is two partition, NTFS. Second disk is single partition NTFS. After adding Promise controller and without formatting new disk, after every other boot when I try to see second disk I get message "The disk in drive D is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?"

If I format new disk as NTFS, I get same message for that disk. If I format new disk as FAT or FAT32 I always read it successfully but the second disk is till only visible every other boot. First disk is always visible.

This is of course most bizarre. Sounds similar to previously reported problems.

Any help appreciated.

 

[drofnala]

Freestone: thanks for the tip. I found some similar information at the Microsoft website, but none of the suggestions worked. Looks like I'll be copying from one drive to another.... Sigh....

 

[inquirer5]

Well I had a similar problem in Windows Server 2003.
For some reason my drive just went haywire and disappeared and was saying that it was RAW.

Fortunately I was able to recover the data using Ontrack software and doing a Format recovery while telling it that the previous file system was NTFS.

I formatted the bad drive and put the data back on it. Funny thing was, it would be accessable in Windows XP, but in Server it had no driver letter and was still labeled as RAW.

The solution I found to this was to assign it a drive letter and mount it to an empty dir on another drive. It still listed it as RAW, but i then ran a chkdsk on it and after that it viewed it as it should. Not sure if your problem is the same, but you can give it a try.

Main thing would be to get ahold of Ontrack EasyRecovery i believe it is and do a format recovery and let it know that the previous FileSystem was NTFS. You may have to leave it overnight, and it may seem that it isn't doing anything while trying to read the block size, but it is. That saved my life not too long back. I can't pay those people enough for that program. Hope it helps.