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Resolved Question

Recovering a Hard Drive

Jan 27, 2012 1:52PM PST

I had a hard drive (300GB IDE Seagate Barracuda) in an old desktop PC that I used to store music and other media on (another drive was used for the Os etc). Now that I've replaced the desktop with a laptop, I wanted to use the desktop as a basic NAS. I did a complete factory reset of the PC (Dell Inspiron) before which I disconnected the second HD. After setting up Windows, I reconnected the drive, booted up and when I tried to access the drive I was told by Windows XP that the drive was not formatted and would I like to format it (which I said no to). What gives? What could have happened to the drive? What can I do to recover the drive to operating status without damaging the other contents? I know I could simply format it, but I'd like to recover the thousands of files I had stored on it!

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Bladactania has chosen the best answer to their question. View answer

Best Answer

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Find And Mount
Jan 28, 2012 7:18AM PST

I tried several partition/data recovery programs all to no avail (or didn't want to pay for them!). finally got around to Find and Mount (http://findandmount.com/). Ran an intelligent scan. Took about 2 minutes. Found the original partition, mounted it, and bingo! the drive shows up in windows explorer with all the data on it where it should be!

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Answer
That's proper. Why?
Jan 28, 2012 3:39AM PST

Since XP has no support for drives over 127GB it does this and may even corrupt the drive.

Update XP with Windows Update and after it's done and up to SP3 and all the patches, the OS will now support over 127GB drives.
Bob

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Already updated
Jan 28, 2012 7:15AM PST

I have already updated to SP3. Also, I've done a factory restore a couple times before, even with the drive attached, with no issues at all.