I downgraded my system from Vista to XP Pro. I have one 80gb HD and one 400gb HD. i cannot retrieve any data from my 400gb, i have 244gb of media in there. I go to my computer, click the 400gb drive, n it tells me that its not formatted and asks me if i want to format it...but if i format it I will lose all my data. I also went to disk management and in the 400gb hd it shows 128gb and 244 gb seperate.... is there a way i can get my data back? I don't want to lose anything Will it work if i upgrade back to windows vista?
Im not sure, but does Vista use a different file system to XP pro? If thats the case, XP probably doesnt recognise the way it was formatted in the first place. Just a guess..
No, vista uses a new system, like NTFS but different. Only XP (and possibly 2000, not sure) use NTFS. Vista needs a modified file system to use its "quicksearch" feature.
Hmm, so 128GB was allocated and the rest forgotten? Well, if it works now then no point complaining, but that is odd - never seen that one before.
try and see if the free program "testdisk" can help you. It sounds like you might have a corrupt boot sector. All the information is still on the hard drive you just have to rebuild the boot sector (which is causing the hard drive to show raw). http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk