Hard drive problems!

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Tikatee

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My master hard drive has recently suffered total failure. I brought the drive in to a shop for data recovery and they managed to recover all my data. They gave me a hard drive with all my data on it. I purchased a new master drive and installed a fresh copy of Windows on it, and I then installed the hard drive with all my recovered data as the slave.

The problem is I am unable to read anything off the slave drive. BIOS recognizes that the drive is there, and the drive appears in the Device Manager, but it does not appear in My Computer. Does anyone know how I can read the data on this drive? I've been guaranteed that the data is indeed on the drive, and I'm sure the drive itself is functioning properly. I checked Disk Management and it says that the drive is Dynamic and Foreign, and it says that the file system is FAT32 (as opposed to NTFS like my master drive). There's also a little yellow exclamation point on the drive. When I right-click on it, the only given option is to Convert to Basic Disk, which it says will erase all the data on the drive. I obviously don't want to do that! This data is very important and I really need to get it back right away. If anyone can help it would be really appreciated! Below are some specs of my system.

P4 2.8 GHz
1 GB RAM
Maxtor 160 GB HDD (Master)
Maxtor 120 GB HDD (Slave)
Windows XP Home Edition SP1

Thanks!
 
Win XP uses NTFS format so, that should've been communicated to the guys at the shop prior to the data recovery.

Unless there is a utility that can help you read FAT32 data with XP I'm not sure how else you could recover the data.

You could partition the master drive, install a FAT32 OS and then burn the data onto CD/DVD. But that would be a lot of work...
 
Your getting confused Smiley. NTFS can read fat32 fine. It's fat32 that can't read NTFS.

What it sounds like is happening is that the disk was setup as dynamic, and that your primary disk is basic. You might try changing your primary disk to dynamic, which won't destroy any data. Once you have done that, then you need to import the disc with your data on it. This also is nondestructive.

here is a link on how to convert to a dynamic disc
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;309044&sd=tech

And here is one on importing a foreign dynamic disc
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/...Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prkb_cnc_klvo.asp
 
Doh!

I'm still learning when it comes to software.. I'm glad you submitted though so he didn't get the wrong information.

Thanks!
:eek:
 
A file system cannot read anything. Windows XP can read both FAT32 and NTFS. Even if it's installed on an NTFS partition it can read a FAT32 partition and vice versa.
 
My apologies, i'm getting some of my older OS's mixed up. But I believe i'm still correct on the basic/dynamic HDD problem he is having.
 
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