Physical but not Logical

[EzraWright]

Just like everyone else on this board I have a HD (IDE) issue. The drive is recognized in the BIOS. But I noticed that it "sees" it as a gig more than it actually is. When Windows comes up the drive does not show up. I have tried using WinHex just to access the drive, but it errors out. In WinHex it is shown as a physical drive but not logical.

I was wondering if anyone knew of a good util to recover or fix physical drives. I would think it would have to be something that can be started outside of Windows.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, I have alot of family pics on the drive that would be a real shame to lose.

Thanks so much,
Ezra

[BeastOverlordH6]

UltimateBootCD

Get the files over to a disc, try out some of its ever so clever utilities. Anything about hard drives; it will have it. The problem is, it looks like the boot disc has at least 40 different hard drive utilities. Use some diagnostic software first to check for problems on the drive, and a run with DiscWizard 2003 after. Again, a lot of stuff--if I knew more about what each individual tool does, I'd be of better help.

[chrisbliss18]

Is this a new drive that you've added or is it a drive that previously had a working partition and no longer appears as a drive in Windows?

[EzraWright]

I will try the UBCD, thanks beast.

Chris,
It was a primary before on another PC. I cant remember the symptoms of the original problem. I just plugged it in as a secondary to try to copy off all the personal files.

Thanks for the help so far and the quick responses guys......

-Ezra

[nizzy1115]

It may just be formated wrong. A program called partition magic should do the trick for you.

[chrisbliss18]

One thing you might want to check before you do anything is what Windows thinks the partition is. Right-click My Computer and select Manage. Select Disk Management from the Computer Management window that pops-up. You'll see a list of all the available drives and their respective partitions. From there, you should be able to see if Windows recognizes the format on the partition.

[nizzy1115]

I have a feeling that there was a primary partition on the drive and a secondary partition. The primary got corupt or got deleated and therefore the computer only sees a secondary partition and can not access it. Partion magic will easily fix this, or you can just use a windows 98 boot disk and fdisk the drive.