Newbie: is there a way to access/reformat this drive?

Kruck

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Sep 3, 2007
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Hello,

I have a 2-year old Vista 32-bit system with an IDE main drive, and two SATA drives. The whole purpose of this system is for the main OS to host VMWare 6.5 and the VMs are on partitions of the SATA drives (SATA drives have 4 partitions each).

Over a short period of time I started getting lag issues, and finally figured out that my SATA drives were getting corrupted (we have a problem with occasional brownouts and power outages, and I suspect it has something to do with Vista using the drive's cache).

Anyway, I was able to access one of the SATA from another PC, and reformat each partition. The drive now works on the original PC again.

The other drive, however, I can't get my XP box to recognize using an external SATA-to-USB cable (the same one that worked for the other drive, and both SATA drives are the same make/model).

I'm willing to completely reformat the 2nd SATA drive, but is there anything else I can do to try to force a PC to recognize it so I can actually format it? I suspect the drive itself is still functional and it is just corrupt data (FAT or whatever), but I don't have enough expertise to know what else to try, to access the drive.

Any help is greatly appreciated!