Foreign Partition / Disk help

[acousticlemur]

a few months ago my mobo died on my win 7 machine. i had 2 WD5000AAKS 500gb drives in it. on bought from new egg, and one from a friend that had a bad sector. i partitioned on either side of the bad sector and made the 2 partitions to show up as one. its been a while so i dont exactly remember what or how i did, but i only used the disk managment in win 7 to do it.

now i am trying to put the "bad" drive in a different computer cause it is full of movies that i would like to watch. but no computer i put it in will allow me to access it. the drive shows up in device manager correctly but in disk managment it says DIsk 1 dynamic and foreign. and anything i try says it will wipe the drive. there are about 450gb of movies on there that i really do not want to loose.

i have googled around and not really come up with anything that will help, anyone have any ideas?

 

[twilyth]

This is a little after the fact, but there is an option in the scandisk utility that will let you search for and mark bad sectors. Once marked, they are effectively ignored. However testing each sector on a big drive can take a very long time. I let it run on a 2T drive for about 12 hrs and I don't think it was even 1/3 of the way through.

I have no idea how you linked the 2 partitions to give one logical drive letter. You used to be able to do this under DOS, but it was done through the OS. That's probably why no other machine recognizes it - although it should be able to see each partition and access them. So that's a little strange too.

I would say the best thing to do is backup the drive and re-scan it with the scandisk utility but this time tell it to search for and mark bad sector. Then you should be able to access it as one drive without any hacking.

 

[acousticlemur]

Yeah, but I can't access it on any computer I've tried. A friends win 7 machine and my laptop with xp both call it a foreign disk and have slim to no options. I found a few utilities that are supposed to fix the error but so far none of them say that I will be able to keep my data. Id say 1/2 the movies are dvd rips I made but the rest aren't replacable. Illtry scan disk when I get home and see if it comes up with anything or if it can even see the drive, and post what I come up with. Thanks for the ideas

 

[twilyth]

This might help - http://www.techsupportforum.com/212520-post5.html

It sounds as if you had the disk created or converted to a dynamic disk in your previous install of XP. Doing this creates a tag or ID on the disk identifying it as belonging to a certain install, for reasons too complicated to explain right now.

Creating a new install of XP left your PC thinking that the disk you have doesn't belong to it.. IF this is one standalone dynamic disk, that is, not part of a spanned or striped volume set (like software RAID), then importing it should not cause a problem. Starting the import process should display a dialog box detailing what it thinks the disk is, and whether it will import successfully. See this:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/...Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prkb_cnc_klvo.asp