Stuffed hard drive.....help!

[InFinRetirement]

Replaced my C drive with larger capacity. Put all my data on D drive. Fdisk/ed C and all was well - 'cept D drive will not play. Sits sulking there, with all my data and won't give it back! Actually, its serious.

I have used the advice of the manufacturers, I have checked and re-checked the BIOS, tried tricks to cheat it, used ONTRACK's famed Easy Recovery which confirms that the data is all there. But when I try to open it in Windows it comes up "inaccessible". In fact, when I right click it, properties says that it has no data and no capacity ZERO on both counts.

Fsdisk confirms that its there and its boots as there. ANY tip might work.

[spannersatcx]

Assuming D drive was already in your pc and was therefore working prior to installing your new drive. I know you have probably checked and rechecked but just incase, check the jumpers for the primary drive are on primary and not slave or the other one that's there also slave is on slave. I know you probably have, but I recently bought a TV with Dolby surround abut couldn't get the sound right when playing DVD's after numerous e-mails I checked and re-checked and on about the hundredth time I spotted my incompetence in that the audio co-ax cable was in the wrong slot, it really is easy to do.
What does it show up as in the BIOS and on your boot up screen the correct type and size? What make is it as there are occasional incompatibilities between 2 different makes of HDD. Is your BIOS the latest and does that BIOS support that size of drive, is it set as auto detect or have you manually set the cylinder size etc?
I installed a new drive as a C drive and used partition magic, for formatting and converting to FAT 32 and disk clone to do an image of my old C drive to the New one, because it was a complete system copy, was it just data that you copied across?
Seems to be more questions than answers I'm afraid.

[InFinRetirement]

Hi Spanners, thanks for the quick response.

I called both manufacturers, Fujitsu and Seagate and there was no hint that there was a conflict. The BIOS settings are OK, having checked them for the umpteenth time, and everything checks out according to Supermicro's book. The BIOS is the latest, did it about three weeks ago. Boot screen is OK and the correct MB's are there, and in Windows Explorer. When I fdisked yesterday C drive had one partition of the correct size.

The BIOS Primary Master and Primary Slave are both set at Auto, both LBA's are on and the PIO is also at Auto.

Today, I took the "advice" of the software I used, that "normal system tools should be used to repair the errors". Thing is that D drive will not allow ANY command - DOS or otherwise. Always coming up with "Invalid media type reading D Drive". Whatever that means. It just sits there sneering!

I have searched my books and my actions over the past 36hrs and I can't get anywhere. Ontrack say they can give me back 50 files, of my 8000, for $49. Its a small price to pay but my work on flight sims over the past two years is on that disk.

I'm not actually aggravated by it just perplexed!

If you've got any other ideas Spanners I will be grateful. Maybe I sholuld get Partition Magic, but does it say it can recover data. The data is there alright but.............

Just noticed that you wanted to know that D drive was already there, - yes it was. I only changed the C drive.



[This message has been edited by InFinRetirement (edited 09 April 2000).]

[FL310]

This may sound weird, but give it a shot. Have the same prob with a computer I built some years back and fitted a new HD as D.

Start the PC and when you see the first screen (usually the BIOS screen) press the RESET button (do not use CTRL-ALT-DEL). Let it start normal and see what happens.
There are HDs on the market which do not like to work with each other or, as it happens, some do not want to be the F/O (D-drive) of a smaller Captain....

[Narada]

Spanner... suggested checking the hardware jumpers on the back of both drives, to make sure the C is set to MASTER and D is set to SLAVE properly - that SHOULD fix the problem. (the master and slave jumper settings are usually marked in really small letters).

If that didn't work, try disconnecting the D drive (both power and signal cables) and reinstall Windows (hopefully you don't have a lot on the new C drive yet). After all is well, try re-connecting the D drive and see if that works.

If that fails, put in the OLD C drive (the one you took out) and back up the important data on floppies http://www.pprune.org/ubb/NonCGI/frown.gif before exploring other options. Good luck!

[InFinRetirement]

Thanks Narada,

Regret that I have done all that. Fact is that C is now OK and the puter recognises D in all areas, BIOS, FDISK, WINDOWS. I even know that my data on it is there, I have seen it scrolling by at a fair rate of knots with a recovery disk that stopped suddenly due to an error. Just enough to make out the files I want!

Problem is I can't access the drive.

[FL310]

One last question, did you, by any chance, have W95 running on the old D drive, perhaps FAT32 and now you installed W95 on the C drive, but still FAT16????

[This message has been edited by FL310 (edited 10 April 2000).]

[spannersatcx]

It could be a problem with the busmaster controller. It is possible that a previous failure to initialise the hard disk controller properly has caused windows to place an entry in the Registry, preventing it from trying to initialise the driver in the future. If you have W98 load the windows 98 CD Rom and in explorer navigate to the TOOLS\MTSUTIL folder on it. Right click the file named noide.inf file and select install. Restart the computer, and it should come back.
Is the Seagate drive the D drive, I had a similar problem when I installed a 2nd seagate. It was to do with the formatting, I will look through all my bits of paper to see if I can find out how I sorted it.

[InFinRetirement]

Thanks Spanners, but guys I have dumped the data! Radical yes, but Seagate have been wonderful and have really tried to help, and with some additional down the line software it became apparent that a few files may have been corrupted. The test they did would have opened the drive if it was going to. The drive is great, and going again but a file or two locked it up.

I'm gutted that I have lost two years hard work with flight sim but there ya go. I'm flying with one of my old Captains on Thursday so I will enjoy the break. Won't get me hands on the throttles but he can't get his hands on a G&T either! Not while I'm there anyway.

But thanks again. If you are at the bash on the 20th, and I especially want to meet you Spanners, I'm in the seat.

[spannersatcx]

Thanks for that InFinRetirement, unfortunately too far for me and I'm working on the 20th. Thanks anyway,
next suggestion would of been try it on the other ide channel.


[This message has been edited by spannersatcx (edited 10 April 2000).]