• 0

hardrive now says unformated? Can I get it back?


Question

My poor computer suffered a catastrophic crash the other day. I re-installed XP on the C: drive. Computer seems to work fine now. But now my D: drive, which is a totally separate physical drive, says it is unformated. I had 60 gigs of music on the D: drive, and about 40 movies, as well as a ton of other stuff as well. Is there a way to recover this drive, or do I just have to reformat and reinstall everything?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

22 answers to this question

Recommended Posts

  • 0

Do you have service pack 2 or 3 installed ?

Original XP won't read a large, > 137 gig drive.

All your files should still be on D: drive -- you should be able to read them, from another XP/Vista/Win 7 computer at least.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

pop in a linux live disk and make sure everything is still there. since you don't know the cause of the crash, you can't be sure what's going on with the other hard drive.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

don't format the D: drive. i use a program called Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery. you'll need a crack for it unless you want to pay for it. i say pay for it, it's so worth it. even if you only use it once, it's much less expensive than having to take it to a business that specilizes in data recovery

it'll scan the unformatted drive and you can recover whatever you've lost. but hopefully your C: drive is large enough to recover stuff too. although you can recover to external drives if you have any available

just a small tip. when reinstalling the OS in the future, disconnect any other hard drives you have, just in case

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

Also check for bad sectors. I prefer spin rite. Could have a bad sector on the start of the drive. Making it show as unformated in windows.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

My poor computer suffered a catastrophic crash the other day. I re-installed XP on the C: drive. Computer seems to work fine now. But now my D: drive, which is a totally separate physical drive, says it is unformated. I had 60 gigs of music on the D: drive, and about 40 movies, as well as a ton of other stuff as well. Is there a way to recover this drive, or do I just have to reformat and reinstall everything?

Are you sure you reinstalled on the C drive? More than once I've seen people accidentally install Windows on the wrong drive (which is why I physically unplug all other drives when installing Windows...).

I highly recommend giving SystemRescueCD a try, especially if you've ever used linux.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

ok, I upgraded to SP2, which right off the bat caused the computer to reboot over and over. I was able to get into safe mode 1 time and did verify the D: drive appears safe. The problem seems to be that whenever I upgrade the OS, it goes back to the problem that crashed the computer in the first place. For some reason, the computer starts to boot up, gets halfway through the boot sequence, then goes back to the start of the book sequence again, over and over, even when trying to get into safe mode. I have now reinstalled XP Pro 4 times, which seems to work just fine. The computer boots up normally and everything is accessible, except for the large 1TB D: drive. However, whenever I upgrade to SP2 in order to access the D: drive, when the computer finished the upgrade, it goes back to the unending boot cycle. Any tips to resolve this problem would be appreciated. Maybe upgrade to SP1a and then to SP3? Let me know.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

if it is a hardware problem, why does XP work just fine when I install it, and the problem appears only when I upgrade it to SP2? Not trying to be a smart ass, it just seems that that indicates a software issue, not hardware.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

if it is a hardware problem, why does XP work just fine when I install it, and the problem appears only when I upgrade it to SP2? Not trying to be a smart ass, it just seems that that indicates a software issue, not hardware.

Slipstream Sp3 onto an XP disc. Then do a fresh install. I bet that will work.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

if it is a hardware problem, why does XP work just fine when I install it, and the problem appears only when I upgrade it to SP2? Not trying to be a smart ass, it just seems that that indicates a software issue, not hardware.

I have never had such a problem, so I thought it might be hardware conflicting.

One thing I thought of, is your BIOS set to plug-n-play OS ? It should be 'yes'.

That may have some effect.

And as far as I know, you must install service pack 2, before Windows XP allows you to upgrade to sp3.

Slipstreaming may be different -- I have never tried that.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

I'm not sure how likely it is too happen anymore, but as of a few years ago it was extremely dangerous to connect a Pre-SP1 XP machine to the internet. It was possible to become infected by just having the system online. I would recommend either downloading the SP3 image from microsoft or like other's above have suggested slipstreaming it onto the disc. Whatever you do, do not connect it to your network untill it has at minimum SP1 installed.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

Thanks for all the tips guys. What I ended up doing was installing a copy of Tiny XP(I hope it is not forbidden to discuss this). That seems to have done the trick and I can now access all my hard drives. Thanks for the help

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

Thanks for all the tips guys. What I ended up doing was installing a copy of Tiny XP(I hope it is not forbidden to discuss this). That seems to have done the trick and I can now access all my hard drives. Thanks for the help

Tiny XP sounds totally legit :whistle:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

Interesting review of Tiny XP .... :shiftyninja:

******* T R O J A N W A R N I N G *******

I previously wrote a kind word of this program and the maker, "Tiny". I was fooled.

The fact is, is there are multiple trojans inside this program AND ALL OF TINY'S PROGRAMS that I downloaded, that don't show up until the ISO is extracted and scanned, or the program is installed and a competent anti-virus program is run ( Like Kasperski) or unless a FULL anti-virus scan is made on the COMPLETE system that the ISO has been downloaded to AND THAT VIRUS SOFTWARE HAS SOFTWARE TO FIND TROJANS , SPYWARE, ADDWARE, ETC....

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

I would say take the First install disc you have, and slip it with sp2 and sp3 using Autostreamer.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

Hum, thanks for the warning. However, I have been running this copy of TinyXP for about 2 years on my arcade machine with no trouble. That being said, I agree with you that I need to redownload my anti virus software and anti spyware software and get it on the computer, since it seems to be a magnet for problems, and is possibly the reason the darn thing crashed in the first place.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.