Hello everyone

I have a serious problem with my SATA drive.
Yesterday I changed almost everyhting in my comp: motherboard, CPU, RAM and graphic card. I only kept my 2 HDDs, one IDE 40GB (on which I have system) and one SATA 250GB (precious data). They were both working fine on my previous config.

After changing so many components I was prepared to re-install WinXP. Yet, it turned out that it wasn't necessary - the system was booted successfully from my IDE drive, there was only lot of messing around with uninstalling old drivers and installing new ones.

Now - WinXp doesn't recognize my SATA 250GB. I know the HDD works, because BIOS shows its status, numbers and capacity, even Windows Hardware Manager shows that it is present, conneted, working with no conflicts and with all latest drivers. Yet, I cannot access any data on that SATA drive - it's just not present in My Computer.

I ran Partition Magic to see what the program can see.
And that's what I found there:

250GB SATA:
DISK1 - Partition: Local Disk (*, Type: Dynamic Disk, Status: None, Pri/Log: Primary

40GB IDE:
DISK2 - Partition: SYSTEM (C, Type: FAT32, Status: Active, Pri/Log: Primary

Where's the problem? Why the IDE drive was recognized and the SATA wasn't?

I hope I can save all the data on my 250GB HDD...

Please help me

i understand your problem, first of all go to disk management and do "Rescan disks", also you said that you can see them there, right click on the partition and choose an option "change drive letter and paths". please post here if this don't work.

I think that's your clue- the disk was formatted as (or converted to) a Dynamic disk, and Dynamic disks are handled differently than "Basic" disks. Do not try to convert the disk back to a Basic disk- you will lose all data if you do so!!

Troubleshooting steps, including instructions on how to reactivate a Dynamic disk, can be found in this Microsoft article.

ok, I entered the disk management and I can see both disks there. My SATA disk is seen as a dynamic disk, but has a status: "Unreadable". After rescanning nothing changed, and when I wanted to change the drive letters assignment, a small window popped up but no options are available to choose/change.


I can right-click on the disk's icon and I have following options: "Properties" and "Convert this disk to basic disk", but when I choose that, a prompt pops up that says about the inevitable data loss, so I'd like to try something else maybe

Perhaps it's because this HDD was working on SATA-I slot on my old motherboard, now it's in SATA-II (but they are compatibile downwards, right?). Maybe I should try uninstalling this HDD, disconnect it, reboot, connect it again and install it completely anew? Do you think this might work?

sata I and sata II are compatible, but you need to setup jumpers on your hd, may be the problem is in this. do you need data on it? if not just reinstall it, and if yes, you can try to restore data with getDataBAck for FAT/NTFS.

Hopefully you can avoid a reformat. Here are a couple of links containing suggestions for dealing with a Dynamic Disk which is reported as "Unreadable":

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Storage/Q_21305462.html
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=236086