Cannot import external Disk Win XP

Hi,
please excuse the flood of windows questions. I'm being forced to use windows for some tasks, and I'm struggling.

I have a laptop running XP.

i have an 3 IDE disks from my old desktop with all my old data on it. The disks are formatted with NTFS

I am using an USB to IDE adapter to connect the disks to my laptop as USB mass storage/removable media.

XP detects 2 ot the disks without an issues and a "removable storage device" appears under the drive letter e:

I stop the hardware and swap a disk for another - fine no problems.

this proves my my usb converter is working fine and that the XP laptop is aware of how to handle these disks.

When I attatch my 3rd and final disk to the USB converter (FYI the converter can only handle one disk at a time) the normal "detection" process kicks in where XP loads the mass storage driver, and I get the mass storage driver in the task bar under the "removable hardware icon"

However no removable drive letter appears in explorer, I still only have c: and d: drive, no e:

I then decided to look in the disk administration tools to see if the disk had a problem or could be seen, and yes it could. It was marked as a foreign disk. I've seen this before when disks have come from other system, and I have simpley imported them.

I right click on the disk to import it under the laptops control but the import option is not available, I can only convert it to "basic" ???? which would destroy the data on it.

there is nothing funny about this disk, it was not part of a volume, it had no extra security on it. All the disks are IBM disks and have no problems except this one disk.

I have attatched an image of disk administator to show what I mean.

I'm trying to get the data of this disk on to my laptop. Any advice would be great.

Failing any help here I'll stick the disk in a linux box and mount it, but I'd like to understand whats wrong.

windows wizards....its over to you.


http://www.projecthugo.co.uk/desktop.jpg

convert it to basic - what type of drive was it before?
The danger is that it's part of a volume (which nobody in their right mind should ever use! :))
Here's the MS guide http://www.microsoft.com/resources/d...b_cnc_klvo.asp

thanks scottyman - it was never part of a volume just a standard ntfs standlone data disk on an ide bus

thats why I'm confused it is the same as the other 2 that work formatted on the same machine, hangs of the same bus etc etc

Bloody "dynamic" disks!! The word dynamic is an oxymoron for hard drives. I have had nothing but grief when using hard drives that have been formatted and selected as dynamic. 4 in total. They are not very fault tolerant and have issues with disk keeper etc. :mad:

I hate them!! I'm gonna stick my neck out now and say I bet the other two disks are basic and therefore work fine. :rant: over

I would convert that disk to basic and retry. I bet that solves it, or I'll eat my hat!! :devilish:

ikonia even if it formats the data so to speak you can still recover the data for the hdd.

The product i use is ontrack's easy recover pro it's what i used to get the 112gb od data back off my hdd when the external caddie corrupted it.

if be interested in hearing more about that

have you succeeded yet?

did you convert to basic? if it's not part of a volume it should be perfectly safe. I have a feeling it may be a windows 2000 pro disk which was probably defined as dynamic by default (rather than basic which is the case with server and xp disks)

Dynamic generally means it was a RAID or arrayed disk, was it?

you have to make them dynamic to use in software raid, rather than hardware raid - but if they're from a different machine, I'm guessing you have to make them basic first

this is the thing thats confusing me.

there is no raid controller in this box, its a basic non-raid workstation.

i've never used software raid on them, or put them in volumes or anything like that.

The workstation had 3 basic NTFS formated disks, nothing more.

I'm worried about converting it to basic as it says all data will be lost, and I can't loose the data at the moment

You will loose the data when converting (my bad, I forgot about this) The only way to do it is to back it up and then convert.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/254105/EN-US/ Here it says dynamic disks are not supported by usb etc :( along with more info on dynamic disks.

Also see

http://support.microsoft.com/default...9044&sd=tech#3

what defines if its a dynamic disk or a "non-basic" disk ?

the reason I'm trying to access it via USB is I want the data off it, so thats why I can't back it up at the moment.

This was a basic disk so I'm not sure why it comes up different to the other two disks that where from the same machine and work like a charm.

I may have to dump this disk in the linux box and mount it, but its just something I wanted to understand why this problem has popped up