liquidsnakerna

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Ok, so I had an old computer running XP and I decided to upgrade it. I upgraded everything (motherboard, cpu, ram) and bought myself a Raptor hard drive. I installed windows vista on it and now I wanted to copy files from my old hard drives onto my raptor. My old hard drives are IDE. I plugged it in and set it to slave. It recognized it as a D drive and told me I had to format it in order to use it. I would assume that this format would erase everything on it?

I didn't format the drive and I decided I would just boot directly from my drive and copy the files onto a flash drive. So I unplug my raptor and set my samsung to master. It starts to boot up and then once it gets to the windows screen where the bar moves it goes to a blue screen and reboots. It repeats this over and over. I tried booting in safe mode and nothing will work. I was wondering if anyone had any ideas on what to do? I really need some files from that hard drive.

I am using a Gigabyte ga-965p-ds3/s3 motherboard.
 

roadrunner197069

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Put new HD on master and old on secondary. Set old one to be the first boot device in the BIOS. You should boot fine and see the other drive, and be able to copy over what you need.
 

liquidsnakerna

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that's what I did originally but when I tried to browse the second drive ( D: ), it asked me if i wanted to format it. And I think that would erase everything, no?
 

liquidsnakerna

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Ok, here is where I am now. I have it as slave and it boots as the D drive. I went to computer management -> storage -> disk management

It shows up and I right clicked on the D drive and set the partition to active. When I go to explore the D drive it still wants me format it. It says the file system is RAW when it should be NTFS I think.

What do I need to do now?
 

Rogue77777

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I'm guessing that your new HD is a Sata, since you said the your old one is ide.
Keep both drives as master and set your new HD as the first one in the "Hard Disk Boot Priorty".

You can also try setting your old drive as the first one and boot into safemode (maybe).
Whatever you do - DO NOT FORMAT your old drive.
good luck
 

cyberjock

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If it's showing RAW format that means Vista can't figure out what file system you have/had and so it's showing just a raw partition. DO NOT FORMAT YOUR OLD DRIVE. My guess is something went wrong during the upgrade. Maybe you bumped the drive, kids kicked it, something. But somehow your drive is either failing, failed, or you have some corrupt data. Whatever the actual status, you need to get yourself a hard drive recovery utility to recover your data. As long as Windows wont show the actual partition type, none of the utilities you have are gonna help. Don't try to use checkdisk or Norton Utilities as they might give you the option to 'repair' your NTFS partition. You click repair and things could be just as bad as formatting. You need a utility to recover your data to a second storage medium. I've used spinrite and I think it's pretty good. Give spinrite a whirl and see what happens.

WHATEVER YOU DO, DON'T FORMAT AND DON'T TRY TO 'REPAIR' IT. Any repair will probably just make things worse. Worry about recovering your data to your new drive, THEN try to repair. But don't try to repair until AFTER you have your data. :)
 

liquidsnakerna

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Ok, so here is what I did. I made a boot CD with UBCD4Win. Everything went fine, it booted up alright...but it still wouldn't recognize my hard drives! However, after a couple hours of playing around I was able to figure out how to assign a partition to it through the boot CD utilities. So I wrote the partition (crossed my fingers that it didn't erase anything) and rebooted. Everything reads now and it even reads in windows vista. Oh, btw, it told me to check my jumper pins b/c it wasn't reading the right amount of space. So I just took the pins out (it was in slave)

Now the only problem I have is that I only have one IDE slot in my motherboard, but two IDE drives. I have an IDE hard drive, and an IDE DVD Drive. Ugh, I think I might buy a 500gb hard drive for storage. They seem to be having really good deals on them now. Or I could get another raptor and run it in raid 0. However, while I'm impressed with the raptor, I am not sure if it is worth the money I paid.
 

cyberjock

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Congrats that it was only a jumper issue. You could put the DVD and hard drive on the same IDE plug with a 2 port cable, but at the price of SATA devices I'd just get a SATA hard disk.
 

liquidsnakerna

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I'm not 100% sure it was just the jumper pins. I couldn't partition the drive in vista for some reason. Maybe I wasn't doing it right or something. But removing the jumper pin helped it to be able to recognize at least the size of the drive on the windows boot cd. Then partitioning it fixed the problem.
 

cyberjock

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Congrats on your stuff being fixed. Computers aren't always about what makes sense, it's about trial and error until you figure out how to 'get around' the problem your having. The goal is to be smart enough to know what you should and shouldn't try when something happens that makes no sense.