Problem Transferring harddrives

[warsrequiem]

Hopefully this post goes in the peripherals section, I am not exactly a tech expert as my question will surely point out.

Ok, I have always had trouble transferring a hard drive from one computer to another. People have told me that its a simple matter of plugging it in from computer to computer, and that all the data will be there (unless I have been sorely misled). Now, I used to have WinXP installed (school deal) and had to reformat my main drive a couple of times, the secondary drive would be just fine, and always came back online with all data intact after the primary drive was reloaded. Now, however, I'm relegated back to Win98, and after reformatting the primary hardrive (long story of another problem) I can not get the secondary harddrive to work. It just shows up as a single drive letter in the windows. So, I ran fdisk, and it shows the drive as having Three partitions (its supposed to have only 2) with the first two listed being the partitions that are supposed to be there, with a Non-Dos "Type" and no drive letters in front. And the other one which has the Drive letter in front, is the Pri-Dos partition., with unknown system listed (i have no idea where it came from.) The status on the first partition reads A.

Anyways, I was hoping someone could help me here, I want the harddrive back to the two partitions with the data intact, but I dont know what is going on (as if that werent obvious). So any help would be appreciated, hope this wasnt an uncalled for post.

[HAL9000]

It sounds like there is a drive overlay installed on the drive. Without it loading into memory first, you cannot see the data. OR, it is a NTFS file system (which really doesn't explain the third partition though).

To run on your machine, you either need the drive overlay installed on your machine so it can load and recognize the second drive, or you need to remove the drive overlay from the second drive. To do this, you will need to boot from this drive to find out what disk manager it is loading (it should state it right before it loads the OS).

[ssahl]

Hey, welcome to PCMECHANIC! Yes Hal is right this guy knows what he's talking about,he has been very helpfull to me and always has given me good information. When you boot from this drive use the machine that has booted from this harddrive and seen the drive correcly.

[warsrequiem]

Alright, so I tried out the booting from that drive, and Im not sure what I was looking for, so this is what I wrote down.

Ok, next to the Drives in the bootup sequence were the Letters LAB, ATA followed by some numbers,

After that it states the bootloader is running, which is EZ-Bios, and then it states windows detects a registry configuration error, then states to run in command prompt only and run scanreg, then it states its missing C:\win\Himem.sys and some other files, I thought was probably related to it having no OS on that other hard drive. So thats about all that I saw, hope that helps, cause I dunno.

One thought someone had was that the Harddrive was moving from a WinXP back to a Win98 and that perhaps there some difference in something I forgot, but the drive was originally installed in Win98, so I dunno if that means anything. Thanx

[ssahl]

Did you run scanreg? Or were you even able to boot to the command prompt? If you were, you should run fdisk again on this system and see if it is seen correctly or not. I'm wondering, what does it say about this drive in your bios? Is it seen right there? It sounds like theres a NTFS partition and win98 cant read it, but I dont know about the '3' partitions. When you say there was 3, was there a drive letter by each one? (using fdisk/status) make sure you were looking at the right drive, if you have more then one drive then you will have a choice in fdisk to switch disks, if you could do that then post what it said, also include size of partitions, if they are active or not, and if they have a drive letter by them or not. The drive is still usable but getting all your data may be kind of hard. When you post the information try and do it word for word, I know it's a pain but it really does help, not just guessing (educated guess) I have seen XP do funny things when installed with 98 on the computer already, but my usual fix is to (if all else fails) zero fill the drive and install a fresh OS. I never have to much data that is that importent to me to get back. Wait and see, go ahead and post the information if you could like I said because even though I cant say for sure whats up, Hal can probably tell you, but he would probably like to see the information before says anything. Hal what do you think? If the information given above is correct, I'm not really sure whats the matter.

[warsrequiem]

Ok, so its definately the right drive that Im looking at in Fdisk, I couldnt run any of the command functions, everything i typed came up with the same error asking where the command.com was, but it wasnt there. The drive had three partitions, the first two had no drive letters next to them, but they were the ones I had originally made, about 26 and 18 gigs each (yes i know, a lotta music from my cd collection and some booted up anime from my kenshin and sundry collection that I was putting on the computer to use at school as my all in one entertainment system, some of its backedup, somes not, so i can take the shot in the arm and accept the lesson of back up stuff entirely, gonna be a pain popping in all those cd's). The partition that does have a letter next to it (letter D) is about 8 megs, not much, and that does have the Pri-Dos Type.

So what I had done at school was installed XP over the primary drive, replacing my Win98. When I got home, the computer was acting real buggy, so I had to reformat the primary drive and reinstall my copy of Win98 (to clarify the school has deals with microsoft, sold their souls, so I had a copy of XP from there, that I cant access over the summer.) When I reloaded under Win98, the secondary drive wouldnt work. Up at school, I'd reformat the primary, install WinXP and everything would load up like a charm, so thats one consideration.

[HAL9000]

Originally posted by warsrequiem
After that it states the bootloader is running, which is EZ-Bios

OK, so there is a drive overlay loaded. The system that you pulled it from probably didn't support the size of drive installed. If you just want to nuke the drive, go to the manufacturers web site and download a zero fill utility. Boot from a bootdisk and run the utility. This will erase everything on the drive including the drive overlay and all partitions.

If you really need to get data off of it, you can do it by removing the overlay, but there is a risk of data loss (although I have never had it happen removing EZ-Bios). Go to the drive manufacturer and download their utility with the EZ-Bios program. Boot from a bootdisk and run this utility to remove EZ-Bios from the drive. Now when you slave it to your other drive, you should be able to read the partitions, which there should now only be 2 instead of the three you were seeing before.