Hi,recently I had to re-install windows and now I cant get my SATA drive working in Windows XP its a Western Digital 500gb I have tried diagnotic programs,data recovery,drivers I dont know why I cant access my drive that was running perfectly ok before The drive is now in a partition and when i double click on the drive it tells me the disk in drive E is not formatted and would I like to format it now,would it possibly be conflicting with my DVD drive? Can anyone help?
I don't think that the problem is your DVD drive. It could, but I am lead to believe that it would be the last choice. First, which XP are you installing? Does it have service pack 2 already installed on it? If it doesn't then that is your problem. Without service pack 2 it will not recognize a SATA drive, especially a 500 GB one. If it does have service pack 2, then we will have to try a few more solutions. I am lead to believe that this is your problem though. Let us know and we will keep trying to help.
No I have been installing all the updates including the service packs so I'm baffled at what could be causing this
I was having this very same problem. The friendly folks here helped me out on that one. Check this out. in windows xp all you need to do is go Start>Control Panel>*Performance and Maintenance>Administrative Tools>Computer Management and click on disk management. you should see your drive. you can then right click on it and select format. On mine, however, I didn't have "performance and maintenance" That is why I put an asterisk there. This should help. here is the link to my discussion. http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/588431
Thanks for reply,it may allow me to format but I dont want to lose data that is on the drive,if i can somehow get the data off then i can format it.
