Hey guys, one for the computer techs out there that may be able to help.

i have two internal hard drives in my computer.

one (80 gigs) is used as my main where i install windows xp, and the other (300 Gigs) is used as storage.

I recently reformatted the main one and re-installed xp, and now windows wont go into my storage drive, comes up with the following message:

"the disk in the drive is not formatted, format now?"


how can i fix this without using a program to recover all my 300 gig of data onto another hard drive.

cheers

Have you installed XP service pack 2 on your fresh install.

nope

do it - all your data will appear.

ok downloading service pack 2 now, will be about 2 hours (266 mb).

will see how its goes.

cheers, hope it works.




its happened to me before, i've had to borrow a mates external and spend 2 days recovering 300 gigs worth. cbf this time.

disconnect your drives before reinstalling

Ok what may have happened prior to you re-installing Windows is you had 2 drives, both either FAT32 or both NTFS format. When you reinstall XP you are given a choice of what type of file system to use. If you didn't know what type and chose randomly there is a chance you now have 1 drive with FAT and the other with NTFS. When this happens the operating system won't be able to read the storage drive. Go the C drive, right click and go Properties, it will state what File System it is. You now have 3 options, reinstall XP and choose the other FS, try and convert your storage drive to same as OS or remove drive and plug into a spare/mates PC copy all data off, reformat to same as OS and then copy back on. If u are not that technical go for option 1.

Have you done anything internally to the computer?

Does the hard drive appear in Disk Management (Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management)? Can you just make it active in there?

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Thboth drives are/were NTFS.


when i go into disk management, this is what i get:



My storage drive (X) is 300 gigs but it shows up as 128 now?

Ok with NTFS (SP1) it will only support 128GB, hence the reason why yours is saying exactly 128. Sp2 supports up to 2TB. But you said you had installed SP2? But anyway it's not a coincidence that your drive is reportinng exactly 128gb so firstly let me know if u have SP2 or not.

And you can see that it's a Windows issue by going into BIOS and it should correctly report the 300gb.