Issue with Windows XP SP2 recognizing a WD drive

Status
Not open for further replies.
I thought I'd seek some advice with this one.

I have a Western Digital 160GB drive that was previously in an external FireWire case made by Lacie. I had it plugged into a system that was, up until yesterday, running Windows 2000 Pro. I upgraded to Windows XP, and I noticed that the drive wasn't showing up in explorer. The removable device thingy saw Lacie's interface. I pulled the drive out of the case and plugged it in through IDE. The device manager sees the drive but doesn't mount it. I pulled it out and tried 3 different computers:

-Same results on my newer PC (Pentium 4 with an ASUS P4c800 Deluxe)
-Same results on my parents computer (an ancient Pentium II)
-On my linux box, the drive is present, but naturally won't let me in since it's NTFS formatted.

The BIOS's on all my machines is current. The only thing I haven't tried is running PartitionMagic to see if the partition is toast or not.

Western Digital's knowledgebase states that it's an issue with Windows and to contact microsoft about it, but I'd rather not have to PAY for support.

I have some sensitive data on this drive (it was my backup for my music production, plus the backup files from when I did the XP install) and some music I've downloaded in the past year that will not be easy to find again, so I'd rather not re-partition it unless I have no other choice.

If anyone out there can help, I'll be a very happy man.
 
unless the disk has been damaged, you can mount the drive by assigning a letter in disk management (start>control panel>administrative tools>computer management>disk management)
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back