I thought I came up with the best solution for keeping my data safe, by installing 2 removable hard drive kits in my case. I have 1 raptor as my C: but the rest are removable. I quickly learned that when you swap out drives, Windows XP does not detect the new drive, and still thinks it's the old drive. To help this, I turned off indexing and write caching. I also assigned different drive letters, so I wouldn't get confused which drive I was working it. I ALSO have to use a Microsoft utility "devcon /rescan" to make Windows look that I've swapped out the drive. After all this, I still have problems. Folders from other drives show up, and I'm frequently stuck doing a disk scan at boot-up! Tonight, I lost ALL the data on a drive after disk scan removed all orphan indexes. I saw it do this before, and no data was lost, so I let it run thinking it was just removing indexes to files that weren't actually on there. Nope! All data is gone, and now I have to use a recovery utility to copy 250GB of lost data. So I'm asking, what am I doing wrong? I see lots of people with removable hard drives. How do I prevent Windows from wiping my hard drives when I swap them? (To add, no important data was on this HD thankfully, just some MP3's and movies, and back-ups of other hard drives lol)
What are the other brands of the other drives?? I know with maxtor, the drivers have a utility where you can do drive to drive transfer, unless it can be your boot up sequence, but since you said your 250gb hdd got wiped, then i suggest you to format both drives, install a fresh windows along with the software after, and another thing is that try finding any drivers for that particular drive and see how that works out before thinking about reformating your comp..hopefully this helps, jes leave follow ups on this threads on what you, so we all can help you, hope this helps
My configuration: SATA1 - C: WD Raptor - stationary SATA2 - D:/G: removable SATA kit where I use WD's EIDE1 - CD drive EIDE2 - E:/F: removable EIDE kit where I use Hitachi Deskstars I don't believe there are any drivers, but I do remember it saying the drivers and utils are only for Windows 95/98. I think I managed to determine what caused the drive to wipe -- I changed one of the drive letters to a drive that was previously swapped out. This caused Windows to think the old drive was back, and improperly wiped all the files and folders. Why, it does this, I don't know. However, it appears fairly stable if I don't change the drive letters. I guess I did this, because I thought the drive letter was wrong. Still, I'm curious why Windows doesn't like removable hard drives. There doesn't appear to be a way to set these drives as removable, like the CD drive is set for example. Windows does a great job at detecting a new CD is inserted. That would be key. It does not seem to matter whether I swap the drives hot, or swap them when the system is off. Although, sometimes swapped hot, the system will hang. It doesn't seem to matter if I swap the SATA or EIDE. A key turns the drive off before swapping. Once I swapped the SATA and the EIDE restarted. Strange.
well heres some driver utilities for the hitachi HDD: http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm and western digitals drivers are one their site, but i couldnt find the drivers cause your details didnt get me far on it but other than that, i'll help you research on this issue
