How can I get XP SP3 to read my Seagate external HD again?

Asked by aprilsimnel (30749

) October 20th, 2010

I have a(n old) custom-built system:

Asus A8V Deluxe mobo
AMD single-core Athlon 64 Venice processor
XP SP3 on a WD SATA-II drive (jumpered down to 1.5Gb/s, as well as some slave drives)
Seagate FreeAgent 500 GB external hard drive

For the past couple of days, I have been having a heck of a time with my PC, and ended up having to reinstall XP this afternoon. Originally, I unplugged everything except the bare minimum I needed to try and fix my problem. At one point this morning, I ended up using a cloned drive to retrieve a SATA RAID controller online to make the F6 floppy I needed to reinstall XP on my SATA drive. Once I did that, I plugged everything back in and reinstalled XP.

Except I shouldn’t have. Once I had XP reinstalled on the original drive, it no longer read my Seagate external drive. I see it on My Computer as “H”, when it had a name 3 days ago. In Disk Management, it’s reading as a healthy drive with one partition, but says it’s not formatted, which means it can’t tell that I have music files in there.

Over half of my music is on this drive.

Is there anyway to get XP to fully recognize the drive or is all my music gone??? Is there any data recovery software I can get? :( I think I’m going to cry.

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2 Answers

This is going to sound really stupid, but you’ve had no other responses so here goes: I just got a Seagate and all of a sudden, my computer (a Gateway running XP and that’s about all I can tell you) decided that the E drive was empty. After a few failed, fancy efforts to get them talking, I just unplugged the Seagate and plugged it back in again. The desktop and other hardware remained running. And when I plugged the Seagate back in again, it started up. I know not why. I apologize for the “attack with bobby pin” suggestion, but maybe that’s all it takes.

perg (2624

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