Help!!! I recently replaced my motherboard and now I can’t access my 80gig storage hard drive. It has all my photos on it and I would really hate to lose them. The hard drive is recognized in the BIOS, divice manager and disk management. In disk management it is listed as a Dynamic Foreign drive. Does anybody have any idea’s as to how I can recover the data on this drive? 
Is this your only HD? Do you have windows on another harddrive, and it shows your photo hd as a dynamic foreign drive?
Is this your only HD? Do you have windows on another harddrive, and it shows your photo hd as a dynamic foreign drive?
No, I have my operating system on another hard drive and am running XPH.
First look on the CD that came with your mobo to see if there’s priority controllers you haven’t installed yet. I’m assuming it’s an IDE drive?
Then you might try ‘uninstalling’ in the Device Manager and see if it loads properly when you reboot.
Does it show up anywhere in the device manager? I remember once having to ‘populate’ the drive before i could access it.
How do you populate the drive? Do you have to copulate with the mouse?
Post a screen shot of your device manager so we can see it.
No, I have my operating system on another hard drive and am running XPH.
I remember having a problem like this a long time ago. It had somthing to do with installing XPH and formating my 0ther (storage drive) while in XPH.
Then after i replaced my XPH with XPPro, my storage drive became incompatable with XP pro
Make sence?
That make’s no sense because xp home and xp pro are the same os. Xp pro has a few features such as the ability to join a network domain, and other stuff…
I remember having a problem like this a long time ago. It had somthing to do with installing XPH and formating my 0ther (storage drive) while in XPH.
Then after i replaced my XPH with XPPro, my storage drive became incompatable with XP pro
Make sence?
My problem is similar. I had XP Pro and went to XPH. My storage drive was formated in XP Pro. How did you overcome this problem?
well if you have enough room on your photo drive, you could install xp on your photo drive without formatting and see if u can get access to them that way, and burn them or move them to your other hd
only thing is this will take an hour or so
Sounds like your storage drive is formatted as a dynamic drive (rather than a basic drive). That feature is only available in XP Pro and W2K - not XP Home. I did a quick scan through the MS Support website and I think you will have problems getting the data off the storage drive - unless of course you change your OS to XP Home.
Sorry - meant to say “unless of course you change your OS to XP Pro”.
Here’s the relevant bad news from the MS Support website:
"WARNING: After you convert a basic disk to a dynamic disk, local access to the dynamic disk is limited to Windows 2000 and Windows XP Professional. Additionally, after you convert a basic disk to a dynamic disk, the dynamic volumes cannot be changed back to partitions. You must first delete all dynamic volumes on the disk and then convert the dynamic disk back to a basic disk. If you want to keep your data, you must first back up the data or move it to another volume. "
I just had a thought. Duh/. I still have the other HD with Xp Pro on it. I was going to format it and make another storage drive. I should reinstall it and burn my pics to a disk. I must have had an awesome brain fart to not think of this sooner. Thanks for all the help people. I did manage to learn a few things. I will let you know if it turns out well.