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Hard Drive now showing

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Hi all, new here. I have a 250GB SATA drive that's divided into 3 partitions (50GB - 100GB - 100GB). The c drive which has the OS in it is the 50GB one, the D drive has files and so does the other partition which is the E drive. Recently my PC got infected by a virus resulting me to format the C drive, which is where the OS is. My Mother board is ABIT KN8 SLI with Nvidia Nforce chipset, if that helps.

After installing the OS I can only see the C drive and the D drive. I can't see the E drive. I checked DISK MANAGEMENT and it shows the drive there with a status of "HEALTHY" but no drive letter...Today, I found out I have to modify the registry. The path is

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Atapi\Parameters

Then Add the Value

Value name: EnableBigLba
Data type: REG_WORD
Value data: 0x1


Im currently in the office and will try it when I get home. My questions are:

1) Will I lose the data since last night I tried making that drive into a Logical Drive, BUT I haven't formatted it or have done anything to it ???

2) Why doesn't the FATALITY motherboard disk detect the drive controllers so that I can install the drivers for it ???

thanks in advance guys/gals

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The D partition exceeds the 128GiB 48-bit LBA boundary; so operating systems without 48-bit LBA will not be able to access D completely or E partition at all.

The solution is, ofcourse, to not use an ancient operating system; but something more modern. You're likely using Windows XP RTM, where the ABSOLUTE minimum is Windows XP SP1, because RTM does not support 48-bit LBA.

So the question is, what OS did you install; when you re-installed the operating system.

You need either Vista+ installation cd, or Windows XP SP1+ installation cd. If you don't have a cd with XP SP1 included, you can use slipstreaming to create one.

Because you tried modifying the partition while using Windows XP RTM, you may have corrupted parts of the filesystem so i can't say if data recovery from D and E is still possible. In theory the E partition should be fine because the old XP could only see part of D and that's where things can go wrong; it only saw part of the D partition not completely.

So you may not need to reinstall with a XP SP1+ cd, but you might have damaged the existing D partition by trying things while having your old XP accessing the data. Now that you installed SP2, can you access the partitions now? Do they show as damaged; etc?
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I can access all the data in drive "D" without any problems, but I can't access anything in "E". It shows drive "E" needs to be reformatted.

I'm thinking this might have to do with XP's less than 137GB limitation. But the weird thing is I have a brand 500GB physical drive thats connected in SATA 2 thats partitioned into two 250GB. And I can access it without a problem after formatting it.

After creating a logical drive, its allowing me to format it. But I did not go ahead with it since I still have data in it. Im still at work and will be out in 2 hrs...going to try that mod in the registry and will let you know the outcome.

Thanks again.

But you installed using XP RTM, which does not support beyond 128GiB / 137GB. I'm guessing that when XP RTM saw your partition table, it believed it was faulty.

You can try recovery applications, to recover the data from E. I don't know what happened to E.

update....I tried the registry mod but no luck. I just ended up formatting the drive, fortunately I was able to find some of my backup in my external drive.

Thank you so much for your help
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