How to make windows see a HDD formatted on one OS when used on another?

[Grall]

I've occasionally had this issue in the past with NT kernel windowses, but usually just when trying to write to a drive I've moved from another PC. My primary boggle is that win8 doesn't even want to SEE the partitions on the drives when running, even though they were visible in the win8 installer.

The drives also show up in the BIOS UEFI (and windows power management keeps spinning them up and down all the time, bah), so they're alive and well.

I have a lot of stuff squirreled away on those drives that I need access to, so any help would be much appreciated. Thankyous!

 

[Albuquerque]

Help me with some clarification, and I should be able to help back

So, you've got MACHINE_A that has been storing stuff on HDD_A. You've also got MACHINE_B that has it's own HDD_B. You have relocated HDD_A to MACHINE_B (in an additive way, you aren't trying to boot from HDD_A on MACHINE_B) and now (MACHINE_B + HDD_B)'s operating system is giving you some grief accessing HDD_A.

Right so far?

Now, you specifically (and first) mentioned problems writing to the drive, but then you go on to mention partition visibility issues. So, let's pare it down: is your first and foremost complaint that Win8's Explorer is not assigning a drive letter to HDD_A? Or is it a bigger problem; that Win8's disk management console isn't seeing the volumes correctly on the disk? Or perhaps even further down the rabbit hole: Win8 shows HDD_A as an offline disk in disk management? Or not at all?

Given all of that, are you able to or have you tried to A: "online" the disk, B: start assigning the volumes to drive letters and C: begin navigating those drive letters? Obviously some of these options depend on the level of issue you had from the prior paragraph

Finally, if you've been able to get to the point of assigning a drive letter and doing some file system navigation, are you then running into "access is denied" issues where you have no ability to reassign the permissions?

 

[Grall]

Right so far?

Yeah, although you just used a lot more letters than I did.

Your post gave me some ideas. I've been reluctant so far to use disk management, just in case it would take it upon itself to wipe my partition clean if I were to try and add the missing partition back (murphy always has to be watched out for.) I was hoping there was some secret trick to just kick windows in the rear to stop it being irritating and just show me my missing stuff.

However, braving the odds by poking around in disk management I noticed my partition (software-striped across twin 1TB drives purely to make them one bigger logical unit instead of two smaller) said "foreign", with a little drive icon with an exclamation mark on it. Foreign, huh? Hmm... Looking around the interface for anything helpful I find...absolutely farkall. I hate the disk management tool, it's terribly poorly designed. Right-clicking, I got a context menu. "Import foreign volume" (or somesuch) looked like a no-brainer choice. It brought up a wizard consisting of a whopping ONE step. Click, done. Ok, my 714GB steam library is back. Yay.

Finally, if you've been able to get to the point of assigning a drive letter and doing some file system navigation, are you then running into "access is denied" issues where you have no ability to reassign the permissions?

Weirdly enough, no... From what I can remember, I've always been tripped up by "access denied" issues those few times when moving drives from one windows machine to another (but as I recall, not when nuking the OS on the SAME machine and re-installing a new OS on it.) I've had to claim ownership of everything on the drive and then things have been fine, but this time...nothing, from what I can tell. Weird. *shrug*

In any case, problem solved. Thanks a lot.

 

[Davros]

I noticed my partition (software-striped across twin 1TB drives purely to make them one bigger logical unit instead of two smaller)

so youve got 1 half of a raid array or youve have a 1 2tb drive partitioned into 2 and youve raided the partitions ???

 

[Blazkowicz]

Disk management is a tool I've never been afraid of, it doesn't do too many things. Create partition, delete partition, format as fat32 or ntfs (or no formatting whatsoever, I don't remember) and mount partitions to a drive letter or directory.
On other people's windows PC, I even go there right away to see what disks are there and what free space there's on it (on linux I open a command prompt and type df -m, on windows I do win+r and lauch diskmgmt.msc)

Just don't do "do you want to convert this volume to a logical volume for no gain and be unable to go backwards? OK/Cancel", though I think that's where you can do software RAID 0, 1, 5 (some of them disabled depending on your license or version)

 

[Blazkowicz]

Also, you have compmgmt.msc which includes it along with users management, file shares management, devices, services, some useless stuff (WMI), all cleanly pluggable components.

I thought those were the most sensibly designed Windows UIs (you have gpedit and some other thing too), they made that stuff so that incompetent administrators can deal with Windows servers and it has been quite successful.

 

[Albuquerque]

Hey Blazkowicz,

You sound like the kind of guy who might like diskpart.exe Are you familiar with it? Command line version of the diskmgmt.msc

 

[Grall]

so youve got 1 half of a raid array or youve have a 1 2tb drive partitioned into 2 and youve raided the partitions ???

The former, except striping (AKA RAID0) isn't really RAID, as it's no redundancy involved anywhere, so it's not "1 half of a raid array". Not sure what made you think the latter (except maybe (illegal) mind-altering substances... ), partitioning a 2TB HDD into two volumes and then striping them would be seriously wacky, not to mention extremely slow - if it works at all. I've actually never tried, maybe windows is smart enough to refuse to stripe two volumes located on the same physical drive.

 

[Davros]

Not sure what made you think the latter (except maybe (illegal) mind-altering substances... ), partitioning a 2TB HDD into two volumes and then striping them would be seriously wacky,

I actually did that with an asus board with a single 1tb hdd (brand new)
Windows xp install would not see the drive, I spent all day changing bios options but nothing would work.
while booting I did notice a message saying "array not defined press f3 to enter raid setup" or similar which I ignored because I only had 1 drive.
Out of sheer desperation I entered the raid setup and chose striped array as I wouldnt lose any capacity. At this point I expected to receive an error message saying you cant create an array with a single drive, but no it say creating array and i got a progress bar. after it completed i rebooted windows xp saw the dive and installed - strangest thing ever.