UGH... thought i'd share this

well, I'm a student here at RIT, and they have this program here for CE and CS students where we can Dl or ship free software to students in those majors. I'm in CE, so i get in on this stuff. Anyway, one of the things i get is Win xp PRO. So i DL that, and burn the ISO to a disc. i copy all my files that i want to keep over to my big 250 maxtor drive, and i totally reformatted my boot up drive since there was so much junk on there. I install windows in like 10 minutes (which really scared me ). I log on after its done, and guess what... IT DOESNT SEE ANYTHING ON MY 250 DRIVE! I tried uninstalling the conections an stuff so maybe it would detect the drive and all the files... well i finally got some programs for data recovery, and they finally see all the files... im currently in the midst of scanning my 250 drive sector by sector, to recover all the files and get windows to recognize it all.... this is so annoying... and btw, if this ever happens to you, do a google on a little program called getdataback. it works really well, and its what im using right now to get my stuff back it just takes forever

WOW, thank's, mate. I just reformatted yesterday and accidentally unformatted my 160... I didn't format it yet as I've been looking for a good program to use. Oh, sorry about that - it sucks I know.

yeah, it should work for your situation as well. i dont see why it wouldnt. it takes a LONG time though. it finally finished detecting all the files that windows wouldnt see, and its currently placing them all back in the drive, and remaking the partitions. im at about %25 or so for placing all the files back so windows sees them. i'll say for a 160, depending on how full it is, will take about 4 hours or so to scan, and put everything back on. dont take my word on that though, as im not done with mine yet...

When installing windows.. since i know it is about as useful as an empty pen, i remove all other drives to keep stupid crap from happening, so i dont have to go through that long tedious process

I got careless, that's all. When you have multiple drives and like to get all the hdd's letters to line up it can be a pain to rember the right one.

after going through all this stupid crap, im definately going to be removing all HDDs that arent being installed with windows, as i dont trust windows to not do this again... i cant even access the entire drive for some reason, so now i got to hope i have my cd keys here so i can reinstall certain games.... sigh... this is SO annoying...

blackpaladin said:

IT DOESNT SEE ANYTHING ON MY 250 DRIVE!

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Sounds like you should have tried the recovery concole first and do a "fixmbr" on the 250 giger. Probably would have fixed it right there....either that or "diskpart" would have.

except i have no idea what either of those are.... send me a PM with your AIM addy plz, so i can get some help here... now i cant even get it to recognize the full size when i go to reformat it... it only wants to format the 137 gig partition that i made when i got it, instead of the 250 i should have... HELP PLZ!!!

blackpaladin said:

except i have no idea what either of those are.... send me a PM with your AIM addy plz, so i can get some help here... now i cant even get it to recognize the full size when i go to reformat it... it only wants to format the 137 gig partition that i made when i got it, instead of the 250 i should have... HELP PLZ!!!

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Read this:

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=337278

boot off your windows cd and when it asked what to do, tell it to recover something so u can get to the recovery console. From there you use "fixmbr", and "diskpart" to fix the drive.

MUCH thanks... i will be doing that momentarily... i appreciate that. that should work then as that is almost exactly what is going on with my computer

can someone with knowledge of problems after installing win xp PLEASE IM me??? i could go in there and do it the way orion told me, but i need to figure out why the other partition on my 250 isnt being detected at all. only the 150 is being found, and even that is showing up as the 137 limit, and i DONT KNOW WHY! someone please IM me. my AIM is bdjeff05... thanks in advance!

blackpaladin said:

can someone with knowledge of problems after installing win xp PLEASE IM me??? i could go in there and do it the way orion told me, but i need to figure out why the other partition on my 250 isnt being detected at all. only the 150 is being found, and even that is showing up as the 137 limit, and i DONT KNOW WHY! someone please IM me. my AIM is bdjeff05... thanks in advance!

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have you installed any of the service packs for windows xp or any updates? if not, you might want to do that.

you might also get some info from computer management (start > run > type in "compmgmt.msc". then go to Storage > Disk Management and look at what it says about your drive.

did you happen to change any jumpers on the drives? that can cause them to not show up in windows.

As strange as it may sound, it appears you are hitting the LBA32 barrier on you HDD. This usually happens when you have a MB (or controller card) that does not support drive larger than 120GB. It usually shows those drives as 137GB max. In order to use drives above 120GB you need LBA48 support.

It is POSSIBLE that you were using some sort of software abstration layer to trick your system into thinking that a 250GB drive was actually a 120GB drive BUT allowing you to use the full 250B.

This would also explain why you cant see the contrents of your 250GB HDD becuase the system only reconizes it as a 137GB and cant understand the file structure above 137GB.

This happened a lot with old systems when they would only reconize up to 8GB and 64GB and we would use programs like EZBIOS to get past them.

What MB/controller are you using? Have you tried a BIOS update lately?

Foxy

did you re-install the chipset drivers or are you just using what windows put on?

firefox, all it takes is a quick look at my sig to see that im running a amd 64 system, with a new mobo as well. it can easily run a large drive.... anyway, i reinstalled windows for second time, and tried installing all the drivers in different orders, and then i plugged in the hard drive in after everything was installed... it works now, except my comp is a litle slow during games, which im still trying to figure out why...