Reinstalled Windows and wont recognize hard drive

[luppapa]

Hi,

Please help I am in a big trouble.
I have two drives a SATA and an ATA drive.

I had Windows XP installed on the SATA drive.
I tried to install Kubuntu GG as dual boot.
The install finished but "cannot load op.system" error message appeared, so I decided to reinstall Windows again.

After I installed Windows it wont't recognize my 2nd drive (ATA drive) with full of data. It can only do this if I delete all data on it. I dont want to do this.

When I change the boot sequence in BIOS for the 2nd drive GRUB wants to load itself (but doesnt). That is a thing I dont understand because I installed it on the 1st SATA drive before (but somehow put GRUB on the ATA drive?).

Please help. I don't want to install and run Linux at the moment, all I want is to get my data back from the 2nd drive and clean up linux and make Windows read the drive as it was before I even tried to install Linux.

Thanx,
L.

[luppapa]

Re: Reinstalled Windows and wont recognize hard drive

A note: I installed Kubuntu GG with the first default option, the use free data option and let the installer automatically calculate the percentage.

[luppapa]

Re: Reinstalled Windows and wont recognize hard drive

Another note:
if I booted with a Windows install CD and then tried the revovery console it just cannot access that drive. It only shows the SATA drive I have Windows installed on it. But GRUB is on the IDE drive.
I dont even get the chance to remove GRUB with fixmbr.
This would not be a problem if there were no data on it but I just simply want my data back if possible....
Please help!

[luppapa]

Re: Reinstalled Windows and wont recognize hard drive

Huh....I managed to get the data back.
That part is OK now.

One thing I dont understand that why did Linux ever write on the IDE drive when I choose the other at the start of the install?

That GRUB is still there but it doesnt bother me since I can read the data and my 1st boot device is the SATA drive.

[mrantonsen]

Re: Reinstalled Windows and wont recognize hard drive

I seem to have the same problem. Mine is a bit special though since it has taken so much time. I have been testing the UBUNTU and the KUBUNTU systems on both my drives. They are both ATA drives. But earlier this fall I found that it still was best with Windows. Even though KUBUNTU has a very good overtake potential I reinstalled Windows. I could not install W2K on the drive I had installed KUBUNTU before but I could install it on the other drive. Luckily I took a backup of all data content before formatting the drive to NTFS format. My W2k lasted for a long time until recently. I was burning a CD with a VCD video on it. It went through and when finished I turned the OS W2K and the computer off. Next time I turned it on the BIOS could not find the operative system. The BIOS found the IDE 0 and IDE 1 but not the partition. I changed the setting in BIOS and restarted several times without any effect. I found out that I wanted to try to recover the W2K and top up my system repair disk and tried to restart from the system repair floppy. But since it could not find the NTFS partition it could not fix the problem. I then tried to reinstall W2K with the startup floppy's and then the CD ROM. But suddenly it did not wanted to read from the floppy drive anymore either. My last option for Windows was to try to install WIN-XP from the startup CD ROM. It worked but when the process of getting intouch with the Harddrive came about it told me that it didn't recognise the CD ROM. So I finally try-ed KUBUNTU and strangely enough everything went well with the installation of KUBUNTU. It found the Harddrive and reformatted it and installed itself very easy. I didn't had much data on the HDD any way so this time it didn't matter anyway. But is this the way its supposed to be. And why isn't it possible to access NTFS drives from Kubuntu/ubuntu. I have another drive that are NTFS formatted and with allot of data on them. I would like to access those drives.