Maxtor drive converted itself

Hey :)

I bought a 160gb WD today which i have set up fine. My old 80gb which was literally full with all my files I thought I could just change to a slave and grab everything from that so this is what i did.

It booted fine with everything showing right in the bios but when i went into my computer and double clicked the secondary drive it gave me a message saying I had to format it. After looking at the properties it would now seem that the file format has changed from NTFS to RAW and it says that I have 0 bytes of free space and 0 bytes taken up, so bascially its saying that my hard drive has never had any space.

I switched the 80gb back to a master just to test it out and it won't boot anymore...it hangs at the verifying pool data screen and i can't boot into safe mode or anything like that.


I downloaded one of those file recovery programs and everything is still there but obviously I need to pay for them to retrieve the files with money I don't have.

Is it actually possible that just changing the drive to a slave has corrupted the disk?

The message has just changed in the last half an hour when I click on the secondary drive it now says E:/ is not accessible. The parameter is incorrect.

Also tried chkdsk but it wont work for RAW format.

Sorry for the long post but is there any way I can get my files back 'cus it seems a bit odd that everything happened just by doing the tiniest thing. Thanks :)


XP Proffesional SP2

Are they SATA or IDE drives? Did you change the jumpers if IDE?

They are both IDE. Which jumpers do you mean?

I will get back to you tomorrow. Just no time now, must sleep.

Have you managed to fix this yet?

Nope, still in the same state as before.

Apologies for not getting back to you. I couldn't find the thread again.

What I meant is that on the back of the hard drives there will be some little pins that you can connect together with little 'clips' or jumpers. They must be set correctly for the hard drive to work. You will either need the manual of your hard drive or look at the label on the back of the drive.

Look at this page.

No prob. The jumper was changed when i turned it to a slave as i thought I could just transfer the files over like a second hard drive.

Anyway, its changed back to how it was before now and sticking on the DMI pool data screen.

I am a bit confused as to where Windows is installed now? Did you copy it from the old drive onto the new one or did you reinstall?

If you just have the two drives you want the one with Windows on it as the Primary Drive and the one without Windows should be the slave on the end of the cable. The CD Drives should be on the other IDE channel.

I installed a fresh copy of windows on to the new hard drive and set that to master.

The old drive which i turned to a slave also has windows installed on it. Could that have been the reason for changing the drive format?

They were both on the same IDE cable with CD drives on a seperate one.

So can you boot when the computer is set up in the way you have described above?

I don't see why Windows would change the drive format.

Thats what was confusing me. I can boot when it is set up as described above but cannot access the old drive because of the new format.

Due to the new format if i were to change the set up round and make the old one a master again it wont let me boot from that drive.

It just seems really strange how it would change over just changing a drive to a slave.

I understand the problem now. I cannot see why it got changed to a RAW file system.

Was the 80GB disk in NTFS or FAT32?

It was formatted using the XP disk a few years back when installing windows so i guess it was NTFS

I am sorry that I cannot be of any further help. I have absolutely no idea what else to suggest. I have been Googling it but cannot come up with an answer except for using something like RecoverMyFiles which is a $70

Someone else may chime in hopefully.