two hard drive questions (one big problem help!)

pencil

Hi All,

My brand new 80GB Western Digital (7200rpm 8mb cache) backup drive woke up yesterday morning and decided that it didn't like windows. It had lost its 'volume label' and windows 2000 was saying that it was corrupt. 'Device Manager' says its fine and 'Disk Management' also says it fine, as does western digital's DOS based 'Disk Management Utilities' - I just can't get at the data. Western Digitals help line want me to format the drive!

Does anyone know a way around this problem? - I just can't lose the data - it my life's work (60GB of multimedia work).

I'm hoping to add a third hard drive to my system - I want to mirror that 80GB drive, the only problem is that the 80GB is a second drive and I believe IDE can only have two devices. Is it possible to get a PCI IDE controller card - any advice, tips links appreciated - this is a tad above me.

pencil

P.s. I have a spare 200GB Western Digital Enhanced IDE Drive that I want to put in.

moridin

What filesystem are you using? NTFS? If you're using FAT32 try accessing the data through DOS, if not then grab NTFSDOS from www.sysinternals.com and see if you can see the data using that.

If it's a "backup" drive then surely you have the data somewhere else, as backups are for redundancy, not for storing stuff

Most computers come with 2 IDE slots, each of which can accomodate 2 IDE devices - Master and Slave. You can buy expansion cards that sit in a PCI slot and add more IDE slots.

Mutant_Fruit

load windows onto the other hardrive, put the "broken one" in as a slave, and try and take some stuff off it when you boot into windows. IF ya can;t take stufff directly off it, you might have to downloadsome advanced programs to recover the stuff. Such as Easy Recovery Pro (i tinhk its called)

pencil

Yep using NTFS.

The broken drive is the slave - OS is on a different drive.

Okay you got me, over dramatising a bit - I have about 90% backup but they are all over the place (big time). Will try NTFSDOS cheers.

I was looking on komplette - will any old PCI IDE card do - I know the RAIDs are no good as my drives are of different size (is this correct?).

unkel

No need to buy IDE card, just temporarily unplug your cd/dvd drive(s) and you can use 4 IDE hard disks then

moridin

Originally posted by pencil
I was looking on komplette - will any old PCI IDE card do - I know the RAIDs are no good as my drives are of different size (is this correct?).

Just cos it supports RAID doesn't mean you can't use them in non-RAID mode

pencil

unkel - pure logic as usual. But I'll buy the thing for long term peace of mind.

moridin - ta for the tip.