Hard Drive Troubles w/ XP

Treycal

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Aug 10, 2004
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I recently upgraded everything in our computer except our old hard drive (new mother board, cpu, memory, etc.). We also added a new hard drive because our old was a tiny (relatively) 10 GB drive. I did a fresh install of Windows XP Home Edition on the new drive (120 GB Seagate Barracuda) using NTFS file system. This is where my problems start.

The BIOS on my new motherboard (Gigabye 7N400-L) recognizes both the new and old hard drives correctly. Windows sees both hard drives; however, when I went to move my files from the old drive to the new drive, the only response I get is a request asking my if I want to format my drive (the old one). The old drive was formatted using FAT32 (I think - it was a pre-made system using Windows 98SE). I tried using the conversion utility (NTFS from FAT32) from the command prompt but it wouldn't execute (can't remember the exact error).

Finally in desperation I hooked the old drive as the master and attempt to boot. Windows (98SE that is) started but eventually bogged down due to all the new hardware (essentially everything) present on the system. So appears that the old hard drive is still functional but I am unable to access the data on through Windows XP.

Does anyone have any suggestions for salvaging the data on the old hard drive.

Thanks in advance.
 

blah

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Dec 31, 2007
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as XP can't stand anything but itself, you can save a little time by:

first of all it is not wize to make an OS partition as big as you did, in case something goes fishy on the OS partition you are done with all the data on it (generally speaking), so better make an OS partition to be up to 15,599,99999999 MBz and rest of it whatever ;)

Anyway, get an updated copy of FDISK (or just use XP CD) to make a small FAT32 partition on the Big drive (after you make an OS partition to begin with) wich will probably be D: then boot with sMALL drive and copy everything onto the small partition in the Big drive. Then you can install XP into smaller OS partition of the Big drive as we agreed :)?)

PS: I hope you can understand what I am bubbling about;)

..this is very useful and helpful place for information...
 

Treycal

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Aug 10, 2004
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Actually, I didn't mention it, but I did install XP on a 30 GB partion on the new hard drive.

I've tried booting with the small drive without success. Since I have added all new hardware to the system, Windows 98SE simply craps out while trying to recognize all the new hardware. I've haven't tried booting to safe mode in Windows 98, but I am not hopeful.

I just can't understand why the drive is recognized (size, existence, etc), but I am unable to access any of the files and am asked if I want to format the drive.

I'm going to see if I can find someone still running Windows 98SE and set up the drive as a slave and try to access the information on it (if only to burn it to a CD)