NT and 2 bastard drives

[Ron_Jeremy]

Hello to all! I need some guidance with a problem that has haunted me in the past on two other occasions.

Before I explain, I'll give you the necessary hardware details:

: SCSI ID 0, 160MB/s, 1 primary (c:WINNT), 1 extended (d:, e
: SCSI ID 1, 20MB/s, 1 primary (f
: SCSI ID 4, 40MB/s, 1 primary (g
: IDE 0, ATA33, 1 primary (c:WINXP), 1 extended (d:, e:, f. NOTE: The two bootable drives (SCSI ID 0 and IDE 0) are never on at the same time.

All physical disks and their partitions are NTFS. All SCSI logical drives and the two other SCSI physical drives were formatted within NT4's Disk Administrator, while the logical drives on the IDE disk were formatted within XP's Disk Management utility

Here's how I create problems for my self;

I disconnected SCSI ID 0, and plugged in the IDE drive. I changed BIOS boot order to boot from IDE 0 first, rather than from SCSI. All was fine and I could access any files off the two SCSI disks if I needed to.

After I finished playing with XP, I shut down and unpluged the IDE drive, plugging the SCSI ID 0 drive back in. Everything was fine during boot and seemed fine upon boot completion. After all, I wasn't expecting any problems.

Things quickly changed when I attempted to run a program that was stored on one of the other SCSI physical disks. All my shortcuts off the Start Menu weren't working. I tried accessing either drive from NT Explorer, but would get a Dr.Watson immediately.

Disk Administrator showed both my SCSI disks (ID 1 and ID 4) as "Unknown". Hmmmm. So, I shut down and plugged the XP drive back in. Well, guess what? My drives are back! I can access their files and run programs off them, etc etc. I am totally confused at this time.

Time to experiment. I take another two SCSI disks from out of hiding and install them in place of the two already in the SCSI chain (don't want to lose data on those two!). I give them the same SCSI ID's, and I patition them with NT's Disk Administrator, like usual. But this time I create an Emergency Repair Disk, and also save the disk configuration within NT's Disk Administrator.

Well, after doing another XP swap, I find the two SCSI disks are totally useless within NT once again. The "ERD" and the "System" File (created by saving the configuration info in Disk Administrator) were both useless in repairing the damage. I even tried situations where the two SCSI disks were Primary partitions or Extended partitions, with the same end result.

Can anyone explain what is happening here? Is this a disk "signature" error? Even though I have the data safe on my two SCSI disks, I don't want to only be able to access them from Win XP. I even loaded Win2K that I had on another IDE drive, and it has no problems reading the two SCSI disks. But again, when switching to my NT disk I just get Dr.Watsons trying to access them and Disk Administrator showing them as "Unknown".

Is my only coure of action to transfer the files to CD-R, re-prep the SCSI disks in NT's Disk Administrator and then copy the files to the SCSI disks?

Any help on how to get Nt to read the two SCSI disks will be most appreciated, especially explaining the process that lead to this problem.

Cheers,

Ron_Jeremy

If you loan a friend $20 & never see them again, it was worth it.

 

[NickM]

It’s familiar to me.
Initially it looks like everything works fine while you’re playing with harddrives unless you open Disk Administrator, or even restart.
Then you discover that the NT remembers your current drive configuration, and it doesn’t care what you had before, and you loose a possibility to return to previous configuration.
If you follow the rule and create an ERD and backup every time after you put any changes, installed any software or upgrade, it’s not a big deal.

 

[Ron_Jeremy]

Like I said, the ERD did not repair my config. I don't know if I used it correctly. I do know it is current because I made it just before using the Win XP disk. I rebooted with my NT cd in the CDROM and chose Repair. After I was told to insert my ERD, NT did it's thing for a while & said everything went fine and to reboot for the changes to take effect. Well, it didn't do anything other than give me false hope........

Cheers,

Ron_Jeremy

If you loan a friend $20 & never see them again, it was worth it.

 

[NickM]

Hmm...I see, I did some screwingups periodically, while mirroring and disk-to-disk copying, but was possible to restore.
Even the path for icons have been changed... I don't know, sorry.

 

[Ron_Jeremy]

Well, thanks for you help all. I found out from Microsoft that I am sh_t out a luck. They DO NOT recommend doing what I did for 2 reasons:

> XP & NT have two very different versions of NTFS. The newer version of NTFS in XP (3.1) automatically recognizes my NT4 NTFS partitions & converts them to it's version to be able to use the latest features in 3.1 (encryption, partition table info, addressing etc)
> going back to NT4 is now not possible

I'm gonna try & copy to CDR in XP, remake partition info in NT, & copy from CDR to NT.

Cheers,

Ron_Jeremy

If you loan a friend $20 & never see them again, it was worth it.