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invalid drive specification!!!!!!

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by egypt2fla

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I recently received two hhds from a friend that had his master hhd crash on him. He hooked up a 20 gb quanta bigfoot hhd with XP home loaded (same os as the problem hhd) and transferred all his data to the big foot.I tried to load xp pro on the problem drive via my ghost image back up only to get the invalid drive specification message booting to a win 98 boot disk. i have Now made 3 boot disk and cannot access any drives but a: and b: in dos .I cannot even run fdisk. Why cant i fdisk or format this drive?

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by jthttk

First of all, DOS is telling you that there are no partitions on the drive. Does the BIOS detect the drive?

If not, you have troubles.
Could be one of the following;
The drive is not configured / plugged in properly.
The BIOS needs to be adjusted to detect the drive.
A cable connecting the drive to the rest of the computer may be damaged.
The hard drive controller on your motherboard may be damaged.
The master boot record on the drive is damaged / the head has crashed on the drive.
The drive might be dead.

If BIOS does find it, your Master Boot (MBR) record may be destroyed.

Download an XP Quick Boot Diskette from bootdisk.com and read the instructions in the readme.txt.

I have run 'FDISK.EXE /MBR' and been able to fix similar problems.

If the drive you are attempting to recover was formatted using NTFS file system, you can boot from a Windows 2000 / XP install disc and enter the Recovery Console. When the Recovery Console appears, run the command FIXBOOT or FIXMBR.

Good Luck!

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