Cannot import external Disk Win XP

[ikonia]

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.

[scottyman]

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

[ikonia]

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

[iranu]

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.

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. over

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

[Apex]

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.

[ikonia]

if be interested in hearing more about that

[iranu]

have you succeeded yet?

[scottyman]

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)

[yamangman]

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

[scottyman]

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

[ikonia]

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

[iranu]

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

[ikonia]

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