XP New Install Corrupts existing NTFS SATA drive partitions

[jnameika]

Has any one run into an instance when performing an XP install on a new drive and having NTFS secondary drives attached and when the install gets to the choose partition it doesn't recognize the existing partitions on the secondary SATA drives?

I installed XP twice. First on a blank drive and then again (on the same drive) deleting the existing partition (160GB ATA) on drive 0. The first time I didn't pay any attention to the fact that it didn't recognize the secondary disk's (SATA 500GB) partition. It came up as "unknown." In fact, the SATA drive was an NTFS formatted in XP. The next install had a 1TB SATA as a secondary device (NTFS formatted) and it didn't recognize that existing partition either. Needless to say the 1TB was full and I am painstakingly recovering the data now.

I can't find anything in technet or here. Any advice other than never do an install with other drives installed. I used to tell people that and just didn't follow my own advice. But I was wondering, is this a known issue?

Thanks.

 

[vacunita]

XP installs sometimes require extra drivers to properly recognize SATA drives, unless the BIOS has a setting that allows them to be detected as either IDE, or Legacy or something like that.

Additionally XP has an established limit for HD's to be fully and correctly recognized by it.

Without any SP's XP can only recognize up to 137GB HD's ocrrectly.

Since the installer doesn't use any SP's expecting it to recognize and use SATA drives that large is not feasible.



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Phil AKA Vacunita
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Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[linney]

See if there are any clues in these.


Why is Format greyed out in WinXP 'Manage' ?
thread779-1509384

UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME error
thread779-1495161

 

[rclarke250]

umm, what do you mean by the installer doesn't use any sp's? I use a winxp pro sp3 install disk, and have installed it on drives as large as 750gb sata drive with no issues. You need to set the sata controller to legacy, and turn off ahci. And if you want a windows install disk that has service packs on it, get the service pack and slipstream it into you windows disk image and create a new disk. Just google windows xp slipstream and you will find numerous easy to follow ways to do it.

 

[vacunita]

I know how to slipstream. That's not the point. The Point is in my various installations the Installer almost always fails to see the entirety of the drive. Granted I've only used a Windows XP with up to SP2 slipstreamed.

I could install on the drive if it had been previously formatted and I chose to keep the existing format. The Installer would report the size as 137GB but install fine regardless. Upon booting of the OS, it would see the entire drive.

I've also had times when formatted drives were not recognized by the Installer as having a format, and would require a re-formatting by the installer, though that is a smaller percentage.



----------------------------------
Phil AKA Vacunita
----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[rclarke250]

I do not doubt you, I have never seen that issue with anything above sp1 which was the service pack Microsoft allowed for large drive support in xp. I always do a full format, I would rather the format catch and mark a bad sector, than deal with the blue screens later. And it has been more than a year since I've loaded xp on anything other than after installing a new hdd,and letting a lan boot take an image from a server,which just runs a script so once it goes,I go.