Help with unallocated drives in XP

[Phnd]

I've recently installed XP home with 3 additional HDD's on an Ultra ATA 133 PCI RAID card, no arrays set up and don't want any at this time. The drives are available in Disc Management as Unallocated. The question is can they be set up without damage to the existing data and if so can someone guide me through the process?

I'd appreciate the help...

[BipolarBill]

If they were RAID drives before, the data is not retrievable. If they were "dynamic disks" before, the data is also gone. If they were basic disks on another system, you can simply re-initialize the disks as basic volumes.

[Midknyte]

What were those drives originally set up as? I agree with BPB.

[r8500]

You know, the more I read this, I wonder if he is worried about data on the additional drives, or if he is worried about the data on the same drive that the OS is on.

[Phnd]

I appreciate you folks trying to help out. I'll give you a better explanation of what happened... I had 6 drives on an ABIT BE6-II mobo, 2 of which were on an ATA controller card operating Win98se. I added a new drive not realizing the card/Windows wouldn't see full capacity. I installed a new controller card, plugged in the drives then on startup Windows didn't see the card. The drives did show up in Explorer. I managed to get the driver installed but a look in device manager showed the drive names were fouled. Next thing I know I can only boot into Safe Mode with errors when trying to do a normal boot. It turns out some VXD file that has something to do with handling the drivers (maybe all the drivers I'm not sure) got corrupted. It was bad enough that I couldn't reload Windows. I've since reformated my boot drive, installed another Mobo, loaded XP, etc. but I still can't access those 3 drives. They show up labeled properly in Divice Manager. In system information, Components, Storage, Drives only the usable drives show. Under Disk all the drives show. In Computer Management, Storage, Disc Management the 3 drives don't show in the upper portion but do show as 1 partition Unallocated in the lower portion of the screen. (1 disc had 2 partitions on it) I thought about running the new partition wizard without formating but I don't know if that would help. It would be nice to not have to re-format these drives but if push comes to shove I have back-ups of what was on them. Any help resolving this, if its possible, would be appreciated.

[Comage]

Hi, pardon me, but would you be running Windows XP with Service Pack 1 (or higher) installed?

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;303013

[Phnd]

New install with SP-2, first time I've installed it so I'm a little behind the times.........

[Comage]

Well I'm not really sure of what might be the exact cause already; everything seems all good to go for setting up the drives.

You might want to look at driver/BIOS updates for the controller card.

[Midknyte]

I think something messed up the partition information. changing controller cards can have that effect, especially RAID cards. I think you're better off with a format and recovery from backup. you might see problems down the line even if you are able to fix the "recognition" issue. that's what backups are for, right?

[Phnd]

Of course that wasn't the road I wanted to travel but what the heck, better to be safe than sorry a month or two down the line.

Thanks for your help

Phil