Slave drive not accessible in XP

hhh8785 · September 2nd, 2002, 08:21 PM

Alright fellas, here's the deal.

The other day I went over to my bud's house to upgrade my computer from 98 to XP. I have a 60GB IBM drive as my primary and a 30 GB WD with two partitions as the slave. The slave already had some files on it, and I backed up as much of my 60GB drive's files on the slave as I could, the rest we dumped on my friend's computer.

We installed XP, transferred all the files from my bud's computer back to mine, and I came home. When I got home, everything seemed fine, and I could listen to the music on the first partition of the slave drive. After setting up stuff, restarting, etc. (the usual drill after a format) I noticed I couldn't access files on either partition of the slave drive, but could see the folders. If you tried to access the folders it said the folder was corrupt and unreadable. After a restart, apparently something happened, and I now have full access to the second partition of the slave, I can see, read and write files to the partition, but the first partition says it is unformatted and asks if I wish to format now.

I'm wondering why exactly I can access the second partition normally but the first partition is being stupid and unaccessable. If you got any info I'd greatly appreciate it, as I got a lot of stuff on that partition. Thanks

-HhH8785

Redwolf · September 2nd, 2002, 08:30 PM

Hmmm...I'm thinking you have FAT 16 partitions on the second drives,

I'm not sure if Xp can convert them or not. If not, just install 98 and run that drive conversion proggie.

Brainchild · September 3rd, 2002, 02:04 PM

yeah I think redwolf's right, look to see what format the slave is in. If it's fat16, you may be able to convert it to fat32.

On a long shot, go to My computer>right click drive D

whatever it is)>properties>Hardware tab>select drive, hit properties, look to see if it's enabled at the bottom of the box. there is also some tools there that might help.

J-Excel · September 3rd, 2002, 02:11 PM

You may also want to go to Computer Management -> Disk Management (in Win2k you get there by right-clicking My Computer and selecting Manage), check out how they partitions are formatted, if drive letters are assigned, etc. I think if you install a previously formatted drive you may have to *import* the partition to the new computer. Seams I ran into this scenario once.

*EDIT* Didn't read your original post very well. What I said to do probably won't help. Sounds like the drive is dying to me.

hhh8785 · September 4th, 2002, 11:50 PM

Just a few quick questions.

Has anyone done a FAT16>FAT32 conversion here before? Is it risky? Is FAT32 a better choice for me to upgrade than NTFS? If I tried to boot up this slave drive on another machine running 98 would it work there?

HhH8785