Drive cannot be accessed due to 'RAW' format

Answer:


Typically, the various flavors of Windows NT including XP mark hard drives with a special identifier. Normally when you install a blank hard drive, the drive gets formatted and configured to be used with THAT system. So when you take a drive from another system - such as your old system, XP will recognize the disk as being "foreign."

To get Windows XP to see the drive as a "native" drive, what you need to do
is:

1.) Open the Computer Managment console and select the Disk Managment item.
(Nifty shortcut: Right-Click on "My Computer" either on the desktop or on the Start menu and select Manage)

2.) When the Disk Management Console finishes loading, you should see "Disk 0" which should be your C:\ drive. Below it, you should see "Disk 1" and it should be your old computer's inactive hard drive. It may, or may not have a little red X covering the icon in the left column.

3.) Right Click on the icon. You should see the following options: New Volume, Import Foreign Disks, Convert to Basic Disk, Reactivate Disk, Remove Disk, Properties and Help.

4.) Select the "Import Foreign Disk" option and follow the wizard. This will make the old drive "known" to your new computer system.

Disclaimer: Of course, this will only work IF - and I mean ONLY if, your old hard drive is in good shape. Since you didn't state what killed the old computer, I'm going to guess the hard drive was probably not a factor.
Never the less, something MIGHT have affected it when the old computer died.

Note: If you're successful in getting the old drive imported, you will probably wind up seeing some odd behavior - things the computer didn't do before. Things such as your computer may offer to dual boot. The new (2nd) instance of Windows XP Home is the installation found on the old hard drive.

Given your new computer's hardware is probably not identical to the hardware from the old computer, it's fair to say it won't work too well without installing the drivers for all the new hardware. Since it's generally more hassle than it's worth to do that and you won't gain much of anything, it's best to copy off the stuff you want to keep from the old drive to the new one and then format the drive. At this point, you can elect to keep the drive in the computer or not.

Submitted by: Pete Z.

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from here


hope this helps

jonah

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