"FitPhillyGuy" wrote in message
om...
: I recently bought a "bare bones" computer (Asus A7n8X Deluxe mobo,
: Athlon XP 2500+ CPU, 512MB RAM, WinXP Home) and transferred my
: existing hard and optical drives into it, from a much older computer,
: where they had been working just fine (the drives themselves are much
: newer than the other parts of the "old" computer).
:
: I have 2 hard drives: my C drive (primary IDE Master) is a 20GB drive
: with the OS and apps; the Slave drive is a 120 GB IBM Deskstar with
: documents only. (Spare me the anti-IBM hard drive stuff, I know I
: should have gotten a WD.) As noted, they worked fine for a long time
: on my old system.
:
: But after transferring the drives, I couldn't get the new computer to
: boot up, I kept getting a screen where the nice people at Microsoft
: apologized for my inconvenience and offered to launch Windows in Safe
: Mode, or the last known good configuration, etc. None of the choices
: worked.
:
: I thought the problem might relate to the D drive: the BIOS recognized
: the drive's existence but misreported its size as 33821 MB (way less
: than its true 120 GB). Specifically, I thought the problem might be
: caused by the software I had previously installed on the C drive in
: order to make the D drive work--in my old computer, it had been
: necessary to run a "Drive Overlay" program from IBM's web site to fool
: the old computer's BIOS into thinking the drive was a lot smaller than
: it really was, as the BIOS couldn't otherwise recognize the drive. I
: figured this software might be both unnecessary, and perhaps harmful,
: to the new computer.
:
: Since I couldn't uninstall the Drive Overlay, I reformatted the 20GB C
: drive. But the clean reinstall of Windows didn't solve the problem:
: the BIOS still doesn't see the entire D drive, and Windows XP can't
: access the data: it sees the drive, and Device Manager says the device
: is working properly, but Windows thinks the drive is unformatted! I
: upgraded my computer just so I could install a DVD burner to back up
: my data, and now I can't access it at all. Any advice that would
: involve me keeping all my data? The drive is nearly full of stuff I
: value very highly, and I have no reason to believe it is truly
: faulty... I tried other cables; don't really have access to another
: computer to try the drive in.
:
: If I bought an external enclosure and tried to connect the drive as a
: USB device, could that help??
:
: My eternal gratitude to whoever can help me...
:
: Joel


MY guess is Xp sees the 120gb drive as a 32gb fat32 type drive and that you
will need the overlay software to make it recognizable to XP XP thinks
anything over 32 gigs is formatted NTFS and acts accordingly. I would search
the MS knowledge base and see what you can find also the IBM (now Hitachi I
think) data base for tips. XP has a how to move from your old computer help
file which might give you some pointers. Don't panic the data is most
likely ok. Just be patient and approach the problem logically. Once you
get into reformatting your into big money to recover the data
You might also consider one of the many disk utility packages around. I
don't know any of them so I can't say which does what but there's lots out
there many as free demos.

claus