Thread: Help with Second Hard Drive

I recently bought a new primary drive due to some issues I was having with my old one. After getting everything back up and running my system will not recognize my slave drive. If I unplug it and plug it back in it asks me to format it. I obviously do not want to do this as there are a ton of pics and stuff on this drive that I do not want to lose.

Any suggestions?

Nuck

I don't know what your issue is exactly but one step you could take is look at it under the computer management program.
You can quick search computer management and then click on - Disk Management or find it by - Control Panel - system and security - administrative tools - then open computer management and select disk management on the left. From here you should be able to get a better idea of what the drive may be doing if its recognized by the computer at all. I don't know how to fix your problem for sure, but when i added 2tb hard drives in the past i would have to go in there and activate or allocate them or whatever it is i don't recall. Since your drive has already been used it would prolly be different but this should give you a better idea of what is going on with the drive if you can see it on the disk management page.

Originally Posted by DJ Mr. White

GParted Live on USB
Use that to boot to linux from a USB. Grab stuff from the drive. Also, wait for someone like Aethe or Kanati or Bunni to comment because I haven't done that in a while so I'm hazy.

I appreciate the vote of confidence, but I'm at a loss here.

I'd echo the liveboot suggestion. Depending on the machine, you can boot from a USB stick/drive or you can boot from a live CD (generally my choice).

In linux I can just tell the machine to mount the damned block device and STFU up about it. Then I can get files. Dealing with any NTFS security is left as an exercise to the reader.

But it sounds like you don't want to suck stuff off, you want Windows to recognize it on boot and be happy. I haven't had any issues with "slave" devices since my first SATA motherboard, so I have no idea what the deal is. I might poke around in the BIOS to see if it's being recognized correctly. I once fixed an issue simply by moving the SATA cable to a different socket on the motherboard.

I'm not familiar with modern disk utilities in Windows (my Windows mojo is old), but that'd be my next step. You can boot to the new drive, so if your machine is at least recognizing the old one then you can use disk tools to futz with it.

You mentioned that it was giving you trouble before, and that's why you got a new disk. It's possible that the filesystem is corrupt. If you can get it recognized by the OS, then perhaps chkdsk will fix it.

[probably want to try: chkdsk /f ]

Wish I could be more help. You'd be better off talking to someone who knows the Windows tools better.


Æ

Which OS did you originally install? Did you install that same OS?
Did you happen to encrypt the drive or it's contents?
What type of drives are we talking about? SATA? Are they SSD's or something else.

I'm finding it odd it's asking to format the drive. Have you tried putting the original drive back in and see if you see the secondary drive?