Help w/ XP Data Drive in new Windows 7 machine

[rgraff]

Hello!

Last weekend I built a new W7 machine for home use. OS is Professional 64 bit. This was a clean install on an fully wiped drive. All is working perfectly with four users.

Yesterday, I physically moved my two 2TB drives, one filled with music and the other with ISO files from my XP machine to my W7 machine. The W7 machine sees the drives, but says they are both unallocated and empty. The drives were not formatted. I recall getting some kind of an error related to the MBT, but cannot recall the exact error (I could probably extract it from a log file, but I will not be home until later today).

Any hints on how best to proceed from here?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Rob

 

[TrainableMan]

Make/model of the 2TB drives?

What do you mean they were not formatted - to be used they must be formatted so if they weren't formatted then they are empty. Or do you mean they have NOT been reformatted so the info should still be there? If that is what you mean then how were they originally formatted (NTFS, FAT32, ?)?

To be honest I have heard of problems going the other way, the 64-bit OS can see it but XP can't and that is usually caused because of the newer large 4K sectors. Read more HERE. But I'm not sure how this could cause your issue.

 

[rgraff]

Thanks for the reply.

The drives are SATA 3 2TBs. One is a Western Digital WD20EARS Caviar Green drive. The other is a Hitachi. I don't have the number handy right now.

You are correct about formatting. Both are formatted NTFS and have both been working on the XP machine as data drives for well over a year. I simply unplugged the working drives from the XP machine (yes, it was turned off, put in a static bag, etc.) and plugged into the W7 machine. The drives were not reformatted when I installed them in the W7 machine.

Rob

 

[TrainableMan]

I don't have an answer so I was hoping some others had an idea.

But something that did pop into my head. Are the drives seen properly in your BIOS? And do you have the latest drivers for ACPI? Also check your RAID settings (or lack there of) are correct, as you don't want them treated as duplicates of each other.