Problem with a stubborn IDE drive...

[jgiorand]

The other day, I purchased a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium (before which I had XP Professional). As I was eager to upgrade, I backed up all my important files to a spare IDE harddrive. This harddrive is mounted in a swappable bay. It is an old IDE Western Digital Caviar drive, and the file system is almost certainly FAT32 (I don't believe I ever reformatted to NTFS).

Anyway, after backing up all my files, I double checked them to make sure I could access them. Everything checked out. After that, I installed Windows 7. Once installed, I tried to access the harddrive. The BIOS recognizes the IDE drive as the primary master IDE drive (with a DVDwriter as primary slave and 2 SATA drives in SATA1&2). Windows wants to "initialize" the disk before it can be given a designation and accessed. Afterward, I swapped out that IDE drive with my second IDE drive, which windows recognized and accessed immediately (so I know its not a problem with the removable hdd bay). So now I come to my two questions...

1) I hear from some people that "initializing" the disk will not affect the data on the disk, while others say its worse than formatting the disk! Which is it?

2) Has anyone had this problem before? Does anyone know what to do? I tried running a data recovery program that I've used in the past, but it doesn't seem to want to access the disk, even though it recognizes it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Oh, one more thing: Just for good measure, I wiped out my main hdd and reinstalled Windows XP, after which the computer still did not recognize the drive.

I just don't get it...the bios recognizes the drive, and WinXP recognized and
accessed it before I installed Windows 7. I have a LARGE collection of audiobooks on this harddrive, and I would greatly like to be able to salvage the data.

Thank you in advance for any help,

Joe

[GDH]

Hi,

When you plug this drive into another PC using a USB connection, does it come up as not initialized in windows disk management?

[rick720]

what did win7 format the primary drive (just curious,shouldnt matter) also try going thru disk management and see if the disks come up as forigen and reactivate them, that should do it (it's that way on servers and i have yet to play with win7)
also were they standard or dynamic disks?