[Ham-Computers] RE: WINDOWS XP doesn't see HD

[Hsu, Aaron (NBC Universal)]

-----Original Message-----
If you cant see it by booting with a floppy then it either has no partition
info or it isnt formatted.
--------------------------

Not necessiarily true.  If booting from a typical DOS based disk, then it
will only recognize FAT partitions (FAT32 if using a boot disk created with
Win95 OSR2 or newer).  Other partition types (NTFS, HPFS, HFS, Reiser, etc.)
will not be recognized by a typical DOS boot disk.  Same with drives
partitioned with some "overlay" utilities (see my previous post).  If you
run FDISK on these systems, it may show an "unknown" partition type - the
partition is there, it's just that DOS doesn't recognize it and therefore
can't access it.  Same with CD-ROM's in DOS before loading MSCDEX.EXE - you
can load the CD-ROM drive device driver by itself and still can't access the
CD.  It's because CD-ROM's are not in FAT/FAT32 format.  MSCDEX adds the
appropriate extensions so DOS can read CD's.  This is why you need two
"drivers" to recognize CD's in a DOS system - one for the drive itself, and
the second (MSCDEX) so DOS can recognize the file system on the CD.

Someone also mentioned versions of NTFS.  Yes, there are different
"versions" of NTFS.  It's a bit convoluted (especially the version "names"
vs "numbers", e.g. Win2K's NTFS5 is v3.0 and WinXP's NTFS5 is v3.1), but
suffice it to say that BE CAREFUL when moving drives between WinNT systems
and Win2K/XP systems.

73,

  - Aaron, NN6O