Can't Access Hard Drive / Invalid Media Type Reading Drive C
Dec 20, 2008
A little over a year ago I purchased a used IBM Thinkpad laptop from ebay for my wife. It came with Windows 2000 Professional installed and everything worked fine. No CDs or floppies came with the computer. A couple of months later, it was stolen by one of her business associates. It eventually was recovered, but the thief had installed Windows XP along with the OS that was already installed. In trying to remove XP and return the machine to its original state, I somehow managed to eventually not be able to use either OS. As it stands now I have no OS and cannot even access my hard drive.When I boot from a floppy then try to change to C: drive, I get the error message: Invalid media type reading drive c: Abort, Retry, Fail?
Lately I have been experiencing a temporary slowdown/freeze and I notice that the hd light is blinking. I can be moving the mouse across the page, for example, when it will start responding erratically or stop. As this is happening the hd light blinks even though nothing is being saved or opened. I have disabled indexing, run virus checks and adware and spyware removal tools. I do have a wireless router attached but i haven't checked to see if it happens with my laptop also.
The other day on boot up I received an "lsass.exe error, invalid parameter" screen. Clicking "OK" just continued the boot up and error message in a loop. This has been a common problem for folks. Although I could not determine (due to the state of the system) if in was a virus or a corrupt file, I was finally able to coerce, after many varied attempts, an overlay install of XP Pro. However, all that was on my hard drive dissapeared (programs, settings, files).
Although, when I went to reinstall some items (Adobe Acrobat, for example) it stated that it was still resident on drive. Further, when I went to do a defrag, it stated that it was not needed (probably because of the small amount of recent installation) but the graph showed 20 gigs of space taken up (my original 18+ gigs and the new install). So, the original installed volume is still on the drive yet I can not see it or access it.
An external hard drive. When it is on & I try to boot,I get the following error : Invalid system disk Replace the disk, and then press any key I then have to turn off the external & press any key to get it to boot. Is there a way that I can boot with that external turned on. Some setting I need to change perhaps? I have an E-Machines computer about 2 years old.
I have an HP Media Center and an IOMEAGA 1Tb NAS. The Media Center software will only record to physical hard drives on the media center. This means any hard drive or USB hard drive. I am looking for software that will emulate this and will point to a network drive this way I can record directly to my NAS.
Reinstalled xp on a computer for a friend. He had all his pics and music on second hard drive.It is a 120 gig IDE seagate.Main drive 250 gig WD sata drive.I unhooked second drive ,formatted and reinstalled xp on main hard drive.hooked up second drive and it is seen in bios and in disk management as a healthy drive but has no drive letter nor can I access it.Motherboard is a asus A8n sli deluxe.Second drive hooked up as master on second ide slot.When i try to assign it a drive letter in disk management that option is grayed out.When i tried to boot from second hard drive it contains no operating system but i saw norton go-back come up for a moment.After researching on net i think that is the problem.Hooked drive up to my computer and same thing.I know he had norton on main drive but dont know why he had it on secondary hard drive.
Hi on my Win XP home system one of my hard drives has dissapeared from my computer' it is still listed in device manager.It is a device of 200 GB on a promise ide card - it apears as a sussi device I have another 200 Gb drive also on this card and that is still working at present.I have tryed to run Chkdsk on it but get "Cannot open volume for direct access."It was working okay this morning untill I ran O&o defrag on it, the PC just rebooted and the drive dissapeared.
I've had a new hard drive installed which is working without any problems. My old hard drive has been fitted into my new(er) computer but I can't access the files that I left on it except for the Windows system and program files. It has come up as Drive F and I've tried everything I know which isn't much, Recover my old documents.
When i restarted my Compaq PC (i know thats a problem right there ) I get an error saying unable to access the hard drive. I tried repairing with the windows XP Cd and it can't find the main partition. I cant install a fresh copy of XP/reformat it either. Is my HD dead? I checked the connections, seem okay.If i buy a drive and put in a firewire case, i can set that up as mymain drive and run XP off that right? (since my machine is severalyears old, notworth upgrading.
I want to know if I can make a specific hard drive on my PC available through the net so my daughter in college can have access to that particular hard drive.
I made a mistake when installing fresh copy of win HP. I had a new HD and i've installed windows on it. But the old HD that was on my PC was found during the installation and the system found it like partition C:. I've made a mistake and made that partition unpartitioned space and than again i have made it partition. The disk is not yet formated but off course, i cant access the data that is on the disk.how can I save the data that is on my disk.
Recently I had some problems with my PC that made me want to run Norton Disk Doctor to analyze my hard drive. When I attempt to do so, I get an error message that says "The operating system, or another process, currently has exclusive access to the drive, or some of its files." Does anyone know how to determine what has exclusive access to the drive and how to make it non-exclusive?
I'm runnin XP Pro with a P4 2.6 ghz processor overclocked to 3.2 ghz. I have 2 IDE hard drives with my main drive as master with 3 partitions and my slave drive as cable select with 2 partitions. Any time I use explorer (not internet explorer, i'm talking about the normal windows OS) to access any of my volumes it takes a hell of a lot of time to show the files in the window. Usually, it takes about 30 seconds for the files to show, and during that 30 seconds, explorer.exe stops responding. What is my problem, and how do i fix it?? I've defragmented everything, but haven't screwed with my page file, if that has anything to do with the problem.
I need to reinstall the OS on the hard drive, but I have to try and get some files off of it first or can I install new OS over the old one without a loss of my files?
When I completely re-did my hard drive, I split it into two partitions; a 50gb C: and a 30gb paritition. I don't know how to format or access my 30gb partition or turn it into an actual (letter):Do I need a special program?
Recently I have not been able to access my hard drive(s) from My Computer. I double click on one of my partitions and the computer does nothing. It doesn't open the drive in order to see the files!! It even doesn't work when I plug in my external USB drive either. It sounds like a windows problem to me. However I can access any disk that I want if I type the corresponding address in the address bar.Do I need to reinstall a driver/services or even XP ?
Having been severely burnt by previous pc crashes I have built my last computer with two hard drives. I installed my o.s. WinXp, SP2 together with several minor programmes on C:I then used D: as a storage drive and have lots of valuable info on this drive including two websites. I have had a crash, and when I couldn't get C: up and running even trying the XP CD and using "R" repair wouldn't start, I then thought surely I will be able to format C: and re-install WIN XP, which I did.The pc is back running, but it has re-lettered the drives, C: , the CD ROM drive is now D: , and the 2nd hard drive is now E: (is this significant?) Now when I go to windows explorer or my computer when I click in the 2nd hard drive I get a message telling me this disc has not been formatted, Do I want to Format this?
*** STOP: 0X00000024 (0X00190203, 0X82ECA898, 0X0000102, 0X00000000) This is the blue screen i get when i disable restart on errors. For what ever reason i cannot access this Hard Drive. Bios loads properly and detects everything it needs too. Just after the bios i get a chioce window that says your computer stoped responding for what ever reason, blah blah blah. It allows me 5 choice, safemode, safemode networking, safemode cmd, last known good config and normally. If i choose any of them then immediatly hit F8 i get the rest of the options for boot up. Every choice ends the same way froim debug mode to safe mode. After you make your selection you get to the windows loading screen. About 2-3 seconds into it the computer goes into a rolling restart mode............
My desktop PC motherboard/PSU recently died; it ran Windows XP Home. I enclosed the hard drive in a hard drive enclosure. Now I am trying to access/copy my files from the old hard drive, using a friend's laptop (also running Windows XP Home).At first, I could see the directory of folders in the old hard drive but not the files themselves. So I followed the steps in this article to take ownership of the relevant folders (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308421).After taking ownership of the folders, I was able to see the actual files in the folders. However, when I tried to copy them to the laptop, I get something along the lines of this error message:Error Copying File or Folder.
Every once in a while when viewing an HTML email or some web pages, upon accessing the page the program (IE or Outlook 2003) will pause while there is vigorous access of the hard disk for 5 to 10 seconds, then the HTML file will be displayed. It is as if the computer is loading a viewer or pagefile or something.
Read a similar post, but resetting system preferences and "taking control" didn't work. Windows XP laptop
1. His board is fried 2. took hard drive out, put in enclosure 3. transferring data to another external Hard Drive 4. when attempting to transfer "documents" he gets an access denied read out 5. Says he has no option to change system preferences 6. "taking control" hasn't worked 7. right clicking etc. hasn't worked 8. says when he tries to view documents he gets a "documents empty" read out and there is nothing there
just installed a second internal hard drive. tried to access bios at start up (to setup hard drive) but system doesn't respond to ANY keyboard keys. system just continues with normal Windows boot-up. once XP is running all functions and software seem fine. no matter how many times I try at "Press Del to enter Setup" nothing works. Jusat before I had this problem, I had a problem with software (which I have removed) that caused my system to lock up. when I rebooted system stopped and offerred reboot options, ea: Safe Mode, but I the arrow keys would not work, system just went directly to Windows boot up.how can I access the bios if system doesn't respond to keyboard?
I have all of our digital photo's on this external hard drive & now I can't access it. When I try I get an I/O device error message. Can anyone tell me how to get back in even once to copy the photo's to my internal hard drive & then burn them?
Microsoft did an upgrade to my desktop automatically, called a service pack 3, after which my Maxtor 3200 external hard drive stopped being recognized by my Windows XP system. A code 10 error appeared every time I tried to access through my device manager, and I cannot find a driver to operate this hard drive, I will many songs and pictures if I cannot access this external hard drive. I went on the Maxtor site and they said, it is an internal driver that operates off of my system, what can I do to access the data on this external hard drive.
A friend of mine at work has problems sharing external usb hard drives connected to his laptop. He is running XP pro, and when he attempts to share a drive connected through usb, giving everyone full control it lets no one in. Not even he can, and he is the creator/owner of the share. I'm pretty sure its not a permissions issue, since it gives the same error when I try to browse it and I have domain admin rights. This has happened with three separate drives, all of which can be shared when connected to any other pc than his. ( I have tried all three on four separate computers, making the share the exact same way with full access.The computer can see the share just fine, it just denies permission to access it either from the computer that created the share, or from any other computer on the network.
In reading this disk as I have lot of useful data on it. I don't want to convert it into basic type as it will destroy the data. Will it solve my problem if I convert disk 0 - the 40 GB disk (system disk) also into dynamic type with NTFS file system (using Administrative Tools>Computer Management>Disk Management) ?
I have a Dell computer where one of the loading .dll files came up 'missing' one day, so it won't boot. I want to get all the photos and other docs off the hard drive. I had downloaded one version of linux and was able to see the files on the internal hard drive, but was unable to copy them to a memory stick or external hard drive. Now I've downloaded ubuntu and booted off a memory stick... this time, it's telling me that the internal hard drive has all kinds of bad sectors and won't let me access any of the files on there.
I have a very strange problem...I have a DVD -/+ RW drive that reads CDs fine but when you try to put in a DVD of any kind it does not recognize it...does not matter whether or not the DVD is a retail movie, DVD -/+ R or RW disc, etc. This problem is not with the drive as this is the 3rd unit I've put in and it has behaved the same way...there is some setting or function within Windows XP that is causing this problem...all 3 of the drives work just fine in other machines. Does anyone know where this type of problem could reside within XP?
I am trying to access the My Documents folders form an older hard drive that is no good (something is corrupted within Windows and the machine won't boot). I am going to replace the hard drive, it's time for that anyway. I have the old hard drive connected to another computer as a second drive. I can see the file structure on the drive, but I can't see the files and folders in My Documents for my old profile. How can I access those files adn copy them to the good drive?
My laptop died and I removed the hard drive.i hooked the hard drive up to my new laptop via a SATA/IDE cable.
I can see the old hard drive in the E drive and it appears that all the contents are there by the size of the hard drive (same as when I had it in the old laptop) but I can only see, actually view, a very small percentage of the drive.
My goal: I want to transfer all old music, word documents and photos from old laptop into new laptop.
