Hello,

I recently purchased a new parts for a computer and built it from scratch. The only parts that I did not purchase were the hard drives. I have 3 hard drives:

1. a 400 gig seagate sata(This is where I have the operating system installed, xp home)
2. a 250 gig seagate sata
3. a 1 terabyte western digital

All these drives had been formatted and have been running fine on my old computer.

After I built my new machine I added the 3 hard drives and went to boot up. I went into the bios and checked to make sure all 3 of them were recognized, and they were. I changed the boot priority to the exact same setup as my old one and was able to load up windows without any problems at all.

The problem comes when I go to "my computer" and check out the setup. The 400 gig and the 250 gig seagate drives show up but the 1 terabyte drive does not show up in "my computer." I went into device manager. The 1 terabyte drive did show up in device manger as well. I checked out to see if there was any issue there. It said that the device was working properly when I went into the properties of the hard drive.

I then went into disk management to check that out as well. Under this location it said that the disk was unreadable. Also I noticed that it was listed as a dynamic disk while the other drives were listed as basic disks. I dont know if that makes a difference or not.

I have critical information dealing with my work that is saved under this drive so reformatting is not an option. If it is a worst case scenario is there some type of way I can retrieve the data and then reformat?

Any help you guys can give me would be appreciated.

*EDIT* I am not sure if this belongs in the hardware section or the xp operation system section.

Have you tried putting the drive back into the old computer?

One thing that you can do is to put the drive into a drive enclosure [you did not specify the connection type so you will have to filter the results accordingly] or you could download a live copy of Linux such as Knoppix or Ubuntu, burn it to a CD, and then boot into it [your cd/dvd drive will have to be set as the default boot drive]. Unfortunately if you use Linux the safest way to back up the data to another drive is to back it up to a FAT32 partition because the last time I checked Linux wasn't totally compatible with writing on a NTFS partition which is what Windows uses by default. I might be wrong so maybe our Linux guy will chime in on that but I would trust Linux more with a FAT32 partition than a NTFS partition.

If you changed the motherboard you need to Clean Install windows.

You can retrieve data by slaving the drive on a functioning computer.

If Windows is not on the drive in question then there should be no issue in reading it later.

But the Operating System must be Clean Installed on a new motherboard.

thanks for the replies so far. I am going to try and reinstall the operating system right now.

Also I tried to slave the same drive on a different computer and I got the same message issue where it read the drive in the bios and the device manager detects it but when I go to disk management it says unreadable and asks if I would like to convert to basic from dynamic.

MS guide on that issue only specifies XP Pro:

How To Convert to Basic and Dynamic Disks in Windows XP Professional

If that particular issue remains here is another possible work around:

How to non-destructively convert dynamic disks to basic disks My PKB

I actually mispoke when I said I had xp home. I do in fact have xp professional. I do have the option to convert from dynamic to basic but then it says I will lose all my information.

Well I re-installed the operating system but the western digital hard drive still shows up as unreadable. Ill try get some screen shots so I can show you guys exactly what I am seeing. At this point I am more worried about recovering the data. I just bought a 1 terabyte external hard drive. Do you think one of those sata adapters would work in recognizing the hard drive? If it can, I could move the data over to the 1 TB external hard drive, reformat the drive, and then move the data back over.

If you bought an enclosure it will show up as an external drive (if it isn't bad) and your OS might recognize it then but if a reinstall didn't work I would suspect that it is going bad but I could be wrong. If it is still under warranty I would contact the manufacturer for an RMA but first you would need to run their extended diagnostics available on their website. But you are right in doing data recovery first and then run the diagnostics. If it passes those you should delete the partition and reformat. If not contact the manufacturer.