New PC not recognising 2 of my 3 hard drives, showing as "unreadable" in Windows.

[MovedGoalPosts]

Unless you were making a motherboard specifically for servers, you wouldn't make it RAID only. You are sure that in the BIOS there is no configuration enabled for any RAID settings?

Were the HDs formatted in a way that your current OS can actually read, i.e NTFS, FAT32, etc?

If all else fails, if your recovery software can read the drives, go out and get yourself another drive, maybe an external one, and copy stuff over to it.

[Simcut]

I bought 1 of these 2 drives about 1.5 months ago, and its a 1TB drive. I still can't get my head round why it would suddenly stop working!

I have to be honest, I'm still not 100% sure what I set my BIOS settings mentioned on page 1 to.

So, itsn ot like I've bought a new motherboard that only supports RAID?

The hard drives are in use and were not formatted. They were the correct file system NTFS.

Cheers

[MovedGoalPosts]

I'm not saying you won't be able to use the drives again, after a format. I'm suggesting a way out of the problem which is recovery to an external drive. OK a 1 TB external drive might well be costly, but in the absence of any other solution, if the data is important, it might be worth it.

I have to say that the only time I've had a major concern over data was when a RAID type setting was in use, that corrupted, leaving me without access to the drives. RAID relies on hardware and software. Too many permutations for things messing up.

Any important data needs to be backed up. You can't rely on just one Hard Disk.

have you set everything you possibly can to any option other than raid? where is the machine they come out of?

You have not got a raid only board as you os is on one drive.

[Simcut]

very strange goings on at the mo, still cant work out why windows doesnt like these hard drives but at least it recognises them being there in a way, so I can recover the data and move it to another hard drive, then convert the hard drive in question and hey presto.

I've just installed a 500gb hard drive which was being unused, I've installed XP on it, Im now going to recover my old 500gb files and move them across, once thats done I'll format the old 500gb hard drive and convert it to what XP requests, that should then make the drive active again I presume?

Very strange anyhow, truly bizarre!! :S

[Strzelecki]

The answer is 42! Try following the instructions here: http://thelazyadmin.com/blogs/thelaz...sic-Disks.aspx

or failing that you could try:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/236086

[Simcut]

Thanks Strzelecki, will give that a go!

I'm running GetDataBack now which has recognised all files on the "unreadable" disk and I'm copying all of the files over to the 500gb that I've put in specifically to backup (that also has a fresh install of Windows on it).

I will give this a go on the 1TB drive however. Thanks very much.

[Ray.uk]

Do you have Sp1 or 2 already on as a Google came up showing this corrected this problem for someone.Assume you deleted all previous chipset drivers etc and reinstalled new ones for your motherboard

---------- Post added at 09:30 ---------- Previous post was at 09:27 ----------

Sorry just read you have installed fresh WinXP

[Simcut]

got sp2 installed mate.

and yes, intalled mobo drivers from cd, and downloaded updates from the internet, but still get the "unreadable" message.

Will try that '42' thing Strzelecki posted next.

In the mean time, incase that doesnt work and loses my data, Im backing things up using GetDataBack and moving it to my new 500gb windows drive.

[Simcut]

Problem now fixed, thank you VERY much Stzelecki! your tip worked a treat, thank you very very much, windows now recognises all of the drives