Hard drive woes

F

fury

Administrator
Staff member
A guy I set up a system for, looks like his WD 80 gig has bit the bullet

He was defragging a drive (he didn't say whether it was this one or his primary one), computer locked up during the process, when he rebooted his OS was screwed so he reinstalled... when it came back up, the drive was not found in My Computer. He looked in Computer Management and it's there but the only option in the right click menu is to Delete Partition. It's Windows XP... Here's the kicker - he took the drive to work and tried it on a Win2k system, and it was active and able to be assigned to a drive letter and accessed. (successfully or not, he didn't say)

Is this drive a goner, or is there some kind of possible driver conflict that is preventing XP from seeing the drive? The 2k system he put it in didn't have any drivers specialized for his computer's hardware, so perhaps I'm thinking a driver got corrupted or something.
 
I've seen that type of problems, it is usually related to a corrupt partition table.

It could also be a buggy partitioning what's preventing windows to assign a letter to the partition, it usually happens when a logical drive within an extended partition is after another logical drive with a corrupted or unknown filesystem.
 
I think partition magic has an option somewhere to copy data, I can't tell for sure thou :shrug:
 
Yep, it does:
partitionmagic.jpg
 
fury said:
Dang. :( Any way to recover the table without losing the data?
Click to expand...
Tried chkdsk? It's on any XP CD (think its on 2000 too). Fixed similar problems for me.
 
fury, is it ntfs, or fat32?
If fat32 you could try "fdisk /mbr" .
on ntfs I'm not sure.
If you have a way to try to "ghost" it to another drive for backup,
then you could do a clean wipe, run diag, and stuff to check it, with
the WD data LifeGuard.
 
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