RAW second hard drive after installing windows XP

I recently formatted my master hard drive and installed XP, but left the slave hard drive as it was. Having installed XP, the slave drive is recognised, but is now "RAW", and when i try to access it, a message displays "the disk in drive d is not formatted, do you want to format it now?"

Does anyone know how i can access the drive, as it has vast amounts of data saved on it.

 

Start - Run - diskmgmt.msc
Check setting in there.

 

Did you have goback installed prior to formatting? If so, your partition table on the second hard drive is fubarred. Reinstalling Goback may make it readable again.

Is this XP Home or Pro?

If XP Pro, did you convert your hard drives as dynamic? If so, then formatting the first hard drive broke the "set".

You may be able to use a program like Partition Magic to convert it, back, if that is the case.

BeerMonkey:

There is no setting in Disk Management that cures a hard drive with a status of RAW.

 

The hard drive is an 80GB maxtor, but in disk management, it is activated, but only coming up as 31.5GB. I'm using XP pro.

 

Goback was never installed, and i didnt convert the drives to dynamic. I have tried reinstalling XP pro but had no luck.

 

Then it sounds like maybe you had a drive ovrlay installed.

If that was broken, then your filesystem would show as RAW. That would explain for the drive size not showing up correctly as well.

Better start looking into some data recovery programs.

I'm sure some people here have some good suggestions.

 

Yeah looks like thats the only option now. Ive found a decent piece of software "easy recovery pro". Would my hard drive size return to the standard 80GB once i have formatted it, or remain at 31.5GB?

 

Well, you will need to repartition first, then reformat. You need to rewrite the partition table first.

But yeah, it should return without issue, as long as you use NTFS.

 

Sorry for the constant questions, but how would i re-partition it. My computer knowledge isnt too great. Thanks for your help by the way.

 

Using Disk Management:

Right click on the drive, there should be an option to delete the partition, and then one to create partition.

Delete it first, then create one.

Go through the prompts, make sure there is a drive letter assigned, it is a primary partition, and quick format it as NTFS.

The whole process shouldn't take more than a couple minutes.

I would use that data recovery software first before doing this though.

 

Sounds to me like a previous poster suggested you were using some sort of Disk Manager or the like on the drive that is now your secondary, which in that case will not be recognizable unless it's booted off of. My suggestion is to set your "secondary" as master and your newer drive as slave and copy your data over to the new one, set them back with the new as master and the I think 80gb as slave and wipe it, partition it and format it.

 

No, thats not what I meant.

A drive overlay modifies your MBR and partition table.

It is generally used by older systems that have bios/hard drive size limitations.

When it breaks, so does your partition table and/or filesystem.

Secondly, a hard drive does not have to be a master device to be bootable. Only the boot order need be changed. Not that it is going to help, seeing how there is no OS on the second drive, AFAIK.

 

just a thought about this situation: could it just be a windows glitch? i've seen the RAW thing before with my usb devices. a reboot usually fixes it.

 

I probably have the same drive as such_great_heights and also use it as a slave. And I have just installed xp onto my master, and guess what!...thats right, you guessed it.

(you'd think i'd have learnt from the last time)

 

Sure does sound like a drive overlay is doing this.

In fact, thats about the only thing it could be.

Sounds like maybe the drive is shipping with it already installed.

 

i've managed to sort it by using the maxblast3 s/w from the maxtor website and updating ddo (or the mbr...not sure which one did it, but it worked).

was very nearly in tears when found out i hadn't backed-up properly...and was 'one more go' away from formatting the bugger!!!

 

You reinstalled the drive overlay software.

This will happen again.

Your best bet is to remove the data, repartition format the drive, then put the data back.

Don't use a drive overlay unless you must.

 

Thanks for that and if you don't mind I'd like to pick your brains a bit more.

After I have formatted the drive, I intend to partition it twice to give me 3 drives, one for full duplex audio recording, one as a temp drive (audio recording general, dvd, etc.), and the other as storage/backup.

I currently have them set as (15gb, 5gb & 60gb (d:, e: & f repectively, but I don't know how big the cluster sizes are, but do know that the largest drive appears to be the quickest out of the 3. How would I set the drive up to maximise on speed (most importantly for the duplex recording). I know drives read the data quicker from the outer part of the disk, but i do not know how to translate that when partitioning.

Your help is appreciated.