X58A-UD3R and SATA HDD

[buschbarber]

I just set up a new PC with and I5 processor, W7 64bit Pro, 6Gb of ram, a Kingston 128Gb SSD SATA drive, and a 1Tb and 2Tb SATA drives that were used as backup drives on another W7 64bit system.

The Kingston drive is the boot C drive. The other two drives show in the BIOS, but W7 does not recognize them. If I open Disk Management, it lists them as Dynamic and Foreign, but shows nothing else. I have gigabytes of data on these drives that I cannot afford to lose.

Any idea what is going on?

[Dark Mantis]

Hi and welcome to the Gigabyte Forum.

Are all your drives set up the same eg IDE or AHCI as before and are they all formatted in the same way eg FAT32 or NTFS?

[buschbarber]

The BIOS settings were similar in both PC's. I am thinking that the answer is here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc787481%28WS.10%29.aspx#BKMK_4


In our case, we moved two disks from one W7 PC to another


Cause:  The Foreign status occurs when you move a dynamic disk to the local computer from another computer running Windows 2000, Windows XP Professional, Windows XP 64-bit Edition (Itanium), or the Windows Server 2003 family of operating systems. A warning icon appears on disks that display the Foreign status.

In some cases, a disk that was previously connected to the system can display the Foreign status. Configuration data for dynamic disks is stored on all dynamic disks, so the information about which disks are owned by the system is lost when all dynamic disks fail.

Solution:  Add the disk to your computer's system configuration so that you can access data on the disk. To add a disk to your computer's system configuration, import the foreign disk (right-click the disk and then click Import Foreign Disks). Any existing volumes on the foreign disk become visible and accessible when you import the disk.

For more information about disk status descriptions, see Disk status descriptions.

[Dark Mantis]

Yes quite possibly the case and along the same lines as I was suggesting. Have you tried to folllow the directions and if so did they work?

[buschbarber]

I will try this when I return home and I will let you know!!

[buschbarber]

When I got home, I brought up Disk Management. The disks in question were Disk 2 and Disk 3. I noticed that Disk2 was Offline. I right clicked and brought Disk2 Online and then right clicked and chose Import Foreign Disk. Once they were recognized as Healthy, I rebooted and the OS assigned Drive Letters.

When these disks were installed in the other PC, I clicked on Create Partition and then Formatted them. The default must have been Dynamic, instead of Basic. I have since been advised that unless the disks are to be used in a RAID, they should be set to Basic, from the start.

[Dark Mantis]

Oh well, we all make mistakes and as long as everything is running right now everything is ok.