Hard Drive Problems

[Tetsuiga]

Hi all,

having an issue with a WD caviar 320 GB drive, this is the situation, the original hard drive that came with my old pc is consistantly bluescreening and generally crashing all the time, as an attempt to replace it, i removed all the files i wanted to keep from the old 160 drive tot he new 320 drive.

I then attempted to create a partion for windows to be installed to on the new drive, when i made the partion it showed up in windows fine the first time i re booted, then i pulled the old drive out and changes the slave jumper on the 320, to the master setting and removed the old drive, when i went to go install windows, the drive showed as unpartioned ?

after putting the old drive with at least a working windows xp install on it, it will not recognize the fdrive at all, its there. but says its unpartioned...

there are irriplaceable photos of my kids on this new drive, i am currently running test disk to see if i can maybe recover the lost partition and temporarly store them on the old "bad" drive, is this feasible? am i going about this the wrong way? any help/suggestions would be appreciated immensly, most of the data on the new drive can be replaced in time, but theres some things i just dont want to lose to a re format ;;

 

[Freeduck]

How about doing it in this order?
Remove the old harddisk.
Install the new one, create partitions, install Windows.
Put the old disk back in as slave and copy the files to the new disk.

 

[snotling]

Well you certainly started out the wrong way... I'm not even sure I get exactly what you did or tried to do.
currently, your data is only on the new drive, on a partition that you cannot see... right?
and nowhere else?
Which servicepack is included on your windows XP CD?
(since you're using PATA drives I bet it's the original release that came with the PC and it can't see partitions over 127GB)