I hope this is posted in the right section, if not mods feel free to move it.
So my problem is a bit confusing and I'll try and keep it as simple as possible. Recently my motherboard ended up going the way of the buffalo so I had to replace it but I kept my hard drives which I'll call drive A, drive B and drive C.
DRIVE A: My primary drive that I've been using for a while now (maybe 3 years) is a SEAGATE 320 gig SATA. I've been using it to boot/host XP Pro.
DRIVE B: A secondary drive that no OS is installed on is a SEAGATE 1TB SATA.
DRIVE C: A drive I've had in my case for quite some time now but haven't been using is a Western Digital 80gig IDE drive.
So after rebuilding my rig with new motherboard I hooked up the drives as I've always had them A as the primary booting XP, B as a secondary drive and C not hooked up but still inside the case (I can be a bit lazy). Everything is hooked up and ready to go, so I boot it up and I end up in an endless reboot cycle no matter if I choose to boot into safemode or last known working configuration.
I decide that maybe I virus or some malware is not letting me boot up into safe mode. So I install XP on to drive C after formatting it NTFS. Drive C is now the first boot option and connected via IDE. Both drive A and B are hooked up via SATA. Windows boots up and starts with no problems. So after letting it settle down, I go to check out my other two drives in the "My computer" window. Both drives show up as "Local Drive" but when I double click/try to explore either drive it comes up with a message saying "Drive is not formatted, do you wish to format it now?" or something along those lines. Of course I don't want to format either drive because I'll lose all of my data, hence the reason I broke out the old crusty IDE drive.
I'll place this again here to help make it easy to follow.
DRIVE A: My primary drive that I've been using for a while now (maybe 3 years) is a SEAGATE 320 gig SATA. I've been using it to boot/host XP Pro.
DRIVE B: A secondary drive that no OS is installed on is a SEAGATE 1TB SATA.
DRIVE C: A drive I've had in my case for quite some time now but haven't been using is a Western Digital 80gig IDE drive.
So I had picked up a copy of Windows 7 and I figured maybe that'll pick up the two drives as they should be seen. So I installed 7 over XP on Drive C, again no hang ups, no problems but same thing happens I go to my computer and both drives A & B say the same thing as they did in XP. I've checked under disk management and they both say healthy but format is "RAW".
So I'm not sure what exactly is going on here. Ultimately my goal is to take what is on drive A and shift it over to drive B. Then reformat drive A and install Windows 7 on it and go back to using Drive B as my backup and sort of forget about Drive C.
I understand that there is a chance that Drive A is corrupt though I suspect it isn't but what really puzzles me is that Drive B is having the same problems.
Sorry for the horribly long post, and if I can make this any easier to follow let me know and I'll do my best to explain. Thanks again everyone.
So my problem is a bit confusing and I'll try and keep it as simple as possible. Recently my motherboard ended up going the way of the buffalo so I had to replace it but I kept my hard drives which I'll call drive A, drive B and drive C.
DRIVE A: My primary drive that I've been using for a while now (maybe 3 years) is a SEAGATE 320 gig SATA. I've been using it to boot/host XP Pro.
DRIVE B: A secondary drive that no OS is installed on is a SEAGATE 1TB SATA.
DRIVE C: A drive I've had in my case for quite some time now but haven't been using is a Western Digital 80gig IDE drive.
So after rebuilding my rig with new motherboard I hooked up the drives as I've always had them A as the primary booting XP, B as a secondary drive and C not hooked up but still inside the case (I can be a bit lazy). Everything is hooked up and ready to go, so I boot it up and I end up in an endless reboot cycle no matter if I choose to boot into safemode or last known working configuration.
I decide that maybe I virus or some malware is not letting me boot up into safe mode. So I install XP on to drive C after formatting it NTFS. Drive C is now the first boot option and connected via IDE. Both drive A and B are hooked up via SATA. Windows boots up and starts with no problems. So after letting it settle down, I go to check out my other two drives in the "My computer" window. Both drives show up as "Local Drive" but when I double click/try to explore either drive it comes up with a message saying "Drive is not formatted, do you wish to format it now?" or something along those lines. Of course I don't want to format either drive because I'll lose all of my data, hence the reason I broke out the old crusty IDE drive.
I'll place this again here to help make it easy to follow.
DRIVE A: My primary drive that I've been using for a while now (maybe 3 years) is a SEAGATE 320 gig SATA. I've been using it to boot/host XP Pro.
DRIVE B: A secondary drive that no OS is installed on is a SEAGATE 1TB SATA.
DRIVE C: A drive I've had in my case for quite some time now but haven't been using is a Western Digital 80gig IDE drive.
So I had picked up a copy of Windows 7 and I figured maybe that'll pick up the two drives as they should be seen. So I installed 7 over XP on Drive C, again no hang ups, no problems but same thing happens I go to my computer and both drives A & B say the same thing as they did in XP. I've checked under disk management and they both say healthy but format is "RAW".
So I'm not sure what exactly is going on here. Ultimately my goal is to take what is on drive A and shift it over to drive B. Then reformat drive A and install Windows 7 on it and go back to using Drive B as my backup and sort of forget about Drive C.
I understand that there is a chance that Drive A is corrupt though I suspect it isn't but what really puzzles me is that Drive B is having the same problems.
Sorry for the horribly long post, and if I can make this any easier to follow let me know and I'll do my best to explain. Thanks again everyone.