I just reformatted now my 300 gig partition is broken.

[donny_paycheck]

I just reformatted and reinstalled XP Pro and patched it to SP1. Before, my D drive, which holds all of my files, was a 300 gig single dynamic partition.

Now I have this:

For some reason XP won't recognize my partition anymore. But I know it's still there. How do I force XP to recognize the single dynamic partition? I know nothing has been altered on the drive, but for some reason, it's not recognizing the partition. I'm not used to using such large disks with XP so I don't know where to go from here, but I need this thing back because it has a lot of important stuff on it. I KNOW it's still on the drive; I just need to know how to access it.

Thanks in advance.

edited for clarity

 

[XunknownX]

Use some software such as Partition Magic. It'll fix all your problems.

 

[meionm]

do you have anything on that drive, if not and you want to make this drive one big partion, delete both volumes and format

 

[donny_paycheck]

Use some software such as Partition Magic. It'll fix all your problems.

All Partition Magic is giving me is that the entire partition is marked BAD. It won't read the old dynamic one either.

There's too much stuff on this disk to just summarily reformat it. I'm going to expend every effort to get it back.

 

[Audioaficionado]

Out of curiosity, why did you choose to use a dynamic disk instead of basic?

google a bit and maybe someone has fixed this before. Also try the windows help files. While you're in Computer Management\Disk Management, try to rescan your drives.

Edit: I just typed Dynamic Disk in the help file search and came up with 20 hits on the subject.

 

[donny_paycheck]

Re: dynamic disk, it was because I figured some hot-change capability might be handy one day.

Also, I've discerned that this is a 48-bit LBA issue. If you don't fix it you can't address drives above 137 gigs. I just need to find the right hotfix for the newer ATAPI.sys driver that enables it, and then change the registry entry for it.

Edit: I moved my question here. I'll close this one now that the problem has been localized. Thanks for the replies d00ds.