>>EMERGENCY<< HDD error requires brainpower...

Hello again fellas. I've got an error that seems simple, but I can't get beyond it. Maybe you can help?

Okay, I installed a new 200GB Seagate hard-drive into a new custom PC running XP Pro as a slave drive for project back-ups. I booted it, found the drive and partitioned it to taste. After about 2 days of heavy computing and numerous reboots as we installed drivers and the like, I realized that the drive wasn't accessing the full value of the drive and "accidentally" did a drive overlay for the drive when Windows asked if I wanted to perform the "upgrade". The system rebooted fine and I was working again without any perceptible issues.

Two days ago, the system was booted for work and the slave drive's partitions are inaccessible via "My Computer" or the "Logical Drive Management" console. The drive's old partitions appear intact, but when I attempt ro reinitialize the disk, a window pops up saying that it cannot find the drive. Now, I've tried to reinstall the drive overlay to no avail and I've done my best to leave it alone thinking that it might be a glitch or something, but when I do a review of the hardware monitoring tools by studying the "properties" of the drive, it appears to be functioning correctly, it has spun-up to speed and it has the proper connectivity and termination. It's just inaccessible as it is now.

Do I need to go into DOS and rebuild the MBR for that drive or is there some othre means to get back the partitions intact with the data being available and accessible again? This is not a drive that can be rebuit and/or reinvented in any other incarnation of itself as it now contains some data that was ONLY stored on there and is now lost unless we can rebuild the drive and its previous structure. I'm appreciative for anything you might be able to do.

Thanks,


Michael Munkittrick
Managing Creative Director
Spiral Design Studios/DieselVFX

Forum COWmunity leader for:
Sony DV
Magic Bullet

Actually, I use GetDataBack and it got back my files late last night, but the error is just wierd. I came to the following conclusion after about two hours of reviewing my MCSE manual. See, Windows 2000 Pro with Service Pack 4 recognized disks larger that 137GB without anything further to do to the OS, but WindowsXP Pro without a Service Pack does not. I was told that an upgrade to Service Pack 2 would remedy the problem, but at 234MB for the distributable file, I'm still waiting for it to D/L. So ultimately, I saved the bulk of my files as a "just-in-case" method, but I'd like to solve the riddle for future problems.

For future reference, a drive overlay is something that an OS or drive software adds so that you can utilize drives larger than the theoretical limits of the OS. The "overlay", as it is called makes the OS think that there is a pair of logical drives at the same IDE address and allows for multiple access points on the drive so that it appears to you as one drive. Technically, you could stripe a drive with overlay with a second partition on itself, but the computer wouldn't see any problem although there would be no benefit.

And by "upgrade" I meant the driver overlay upgrade for the HDD itself. Had I used my original Windows 2000 Pro install with Service Pack 4 and simply upgraded that install to Windows XP instead of installing a "fresh" install, everything would most likely be fine. My stupidity sometimes beats me at my own game.

Anyway, thanks for the input.


Michael Munkittrick
Managing Creative Director
Spiral Design Studios/DieselVFX

Forum COWmunity leader for:
Sony DV
Magic Bullet