Interesting HDD Issue

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KSoD

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Alright got a machine here. Specs dont know.

What i do know is that there are 2 HDD's in the machine. Now using GPArted the 2 drives show up. Both NTFS and both used.

Now logging into XP Home there is only 1 drive. The other drive, while being NTFS is labeled as foreign. That doesnt seem right to me.

Now the drive was previously used for XP Pro and is NTFS. So why cant it be recognized?

I have done everything i can within Windows. Short of trying to format the blasted thing again. But we want the information off of it. Any ideas?
 
It is IDE. The BIOS recognizes it as well. Both hard drives are fully scene everywhere else. It is only XP Home that is having a issue seeing the old XP Pro drive. It is listed in Device Manager but nothing can be done there. In the Disk Management it is shown but only says foreign and nothing can be done with it. It cant be formatted, changed or modified in any way.

I will just tell them to get a Linux LiveCD and get the data off there. Installing XP Pro wont help this situation. The drive is corrupted in some way.
 
its possible, though long shot here. is the 2nd hard drive set to select or slave? because depending on if their using the same ide cable they way they connect the cable can cause sometimes on some MB (like my old amd one) not to recognize the 2nd hard drive if its connected with the last ide cable instead of the middle one.
 
The cables are setup right. I checked them personally. You case would ahve been a bad cable. This case it is not cause i used it on my PC on my DVD Drives and they work.

This is totally odd.
 
talked to a friend who had a similar problem he told me to tell u to try a program called Super FDisk take a look at that and see if it will help you.
 
What does the right click menu in Disk Management have to offer for that drive?

Nothing. It says the driive is foreign. That is it. no right click offers nothing and there is no data or anything provided. Yet I can access the drive with gparted and Ubuntu LiveCD.
 
The drive could be a drive that was part of a raid array or it could be an encrypted volume belonging to some 3rd party encryption program. You could run a recovery program that does a low level search to see it can find anything. It's also possible the partition table is hosed. If that's the case partition recovery program might work.
 
I dont think it is either of those. I was able to access the drive from a LiveCD and read data from it. I wouldnt be able to do that if the partition table was lost. I know that wouldnt have happened if the drive was part of a array. Considering the source. I highly doubt that is the case. They barely know what good software is, let alone how to raid. It was my bro in law's co-worker.

I jsut told him to either use teh LiveCD trick like i did and get the data off of there or just use GParted and format the dang thing.
 
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