Hidden data

MONKi

Hi,

I have a quick one...

The other day I brought a hard drive from home into work to transfere a few gigs of data I'd downloaded. When I plugged it in to my work PC the drive showed up as about 9gigs when its actually 160. Anyway when I get it home and plug it in I find that the drive shows up as 128 (even in disk manager) and I cant find my data from work anywhere.

The work PC is running Win2kpro and Ive got Xppro at home

Is this a file system issue? I just dont know

ViperVenoM

do you have SP1 i believe without it XP doesnt read anything over 137gb ..i hated reinstalling windows id lose all the files on my bigger drivers for a while and..it was all nasty till i got an sp1 intergrated..phew

but anyways having SP1 install should do it (maxtor has a program that enables bigger drives but again im sure u still need SP1)

if that doesnt fix is..bios update or a pci card is all i can think of..the pci cards read any size drive i think..

MONKi

Thanks, but what is SP1? Is it a pluin I can dowload pretty easy??

Stephen

SP1 = service pack 1. Service pack 2 is out now and includes everything from SP1. You can download a full install version of it from MS - its about 200MB. Alternatively you can get them to send it to you on CD but it takes about a month to arrive.

However, I don't think this is the problem. Is the work PC oldish? It looks like its BIOS is limiting what it can address on the hard disk rather than the operating system.

MONKi

No the work one I pretty new, I dont even know the spec!

Ive tried a bunch of disk mangers and partioning tools but nothing can view the files I put on the drive. Im wondering if win2k uses a different file system than Xp

Its the only explaination I can think of.

What do you think?

aidan_walsh

MONKi wrote:

No the work one I pretty new, I dont even know the spec!

Ive tried a bunch of disk mangers and partioning tools but nothing can view the files I put on the drive. Im wondering if win2k uses a different file system than Xp

Its the only explaination I can think of.

What do you think?

Thats a possible problem alright. WindowsXP has a updated version of the NTFS file system, which 2000 may not be able to read correctly. However, that wouldn't explain why you are having difficulties at home, unless you tried to write files to the disk while on 2000... Theoretically, that may cause problems...

MONKi

yeah thats all I can think of

When i view the drive with Partition manager most of it appers invalid yet i can vew files through windows explorer on the disk no probem.

Does anyone know of any software that will allow me to view everything on the drive?
(on any file system or OS)

carbsy

It could be a corrupt partition table caused by the work pc accessing the drive incorrectly.I suggest booting from the WinXP cd at home and repairing the partition table.