I have a 40GB WD drive that has become unreadable after a windows XP installation on another (Newly added) drive in the same system. The 40GB drive was ?theoretically? not touched (was originally the 2nd drive (D) in a two drive system), however XP now sees it as a ?Raw? disk, vs the actual FAT32 single partition. In the XP Drive Administration page, the type of partition is blank. The new boot drive (C) is a 100GB clean XP installation NTFS and is fine, as is the old boot (formerly C) drive, which is a 6 GB FAT32 drive.
The 40 GB drive is on the Primary IDE cable as a slave to the 100GB new drive C.
Other notes– the drive appeared to be functioning fine (folders visible, drive “D” name, etc.) after the 100 GB Drive additioin and XP install, but “disappeared” on a subsequent reboot.
It has about 35GBs of useful info on the drive. We have run Western Digital?s diags on the disk and the disk is mechanically OK, but it is not showing up on the boot-up and XP wants (asks) to ?initialize? it.
My question is whether any of the “recovery” products might be able to restore the readability of the disk, or is there something else I can try . Please comment. Partition Magic has not worked in this case.
My local PC shop has tried a number of utilities – about half see it as a FAT32 and the other see it as Raw. Nothing they have tried as yet has worked, though they were successful in creating an identically “Bad” drive out of a brand new 40GB drive they had on theshelf. I am picking the PC up today – they have given up on it, I think.
Any comments would be much appreciated!!!