Going to bed concerned

[LumenLux]

Recently installed new C drive and full clean install of XP Home. Two other hard drives in the machine. The 2nd drive (Primary slave, 30 gig) has been working, partitioned as Drive F and Drive H. This evening I noticed a desktop shortcut to my latest PTE Show would not work. The shortcut would not work because the PTE show was on Drive F. When I look in Explorer all my drives still "show up", but F Drive, which used to have a name, is now called "Local Drive" and if I right click it, properties, I get message that the drive is not formatted and do I want to format it now?! The other partition "H" on the same physical drive is working fine. Where am I? Is there a way to emerge from this bad dream?

[Lloegyr]

First thing DO NOT format it! The order of your drives will have changed and you will still have info on it.

Next we have to work out the correct solution. I will be back as no doubt will others.

Mike

Mersea Island

[Ken Cox]

Bob

did you run scandisk

did you run a system restore

ken

[LumenLux]

Thank you Mike, I will not format the drive. I have more info now which may help you or another member solve this.

Ken - About first thing I tried was the System Restore feature in XP. I chose the most recent "check point" to restore to. (The time of the "check point" appears to be about when the problem may have occurred.) When I click to "Restore", a message comes up that changes to Drive F will not be restored because F Drive had been removed, or turned off, or excluded from monitoring. I tried the restore anyway, but no help done for F drive. Scan Disk will not run on this F partition now. When I use explorer, the "properties" tag does not even come up on F (just message that drive is not formatted.) If instead, I try Scan Disk from My Computer, the Scan Disk window comes up, but nothing happerns when I push the scan button.

Now, new info that may help.

I think the "drive is not formatted" is not an accurate diagnosis.

I now find that all drives and all partitions and even my floppy drive A are showing some problems. But the "problems" may also just be bad error messages from XP. For example: I have Irfanview set as my "default" to open any graphic file I click on. When I now click on any grapic on any drive (including Drive A), I get message: The volume does not contain a recognized file system. Please make sure that all required file system drivers are loaded and that the volume is not corrupted. But the graphic file will open from same place if I tell it to Open with Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. So I concluded Irfanview is trying to run from Drive F and the message about "not a recognized file system" is misleading?

When I installed the new C drive and XP on it a couple of weeks ago, I set C drive to be NTFS file system. I think I left the other two Hard Drives as Fat32.

I hope some of the above will help diagnose and come up with a solution.