Windows 7 turns hard drives with data to hard drives with unallocated space after they are used with XP/Vista

07
2014-07
  • Mika Jacobi

    This question was asked by a user on Microsoft Answers website las year, but it had no answers so far (unsurprisingly). I am facing the exact same issue.

    Here are the steps to reproduce this problem using the same computer :

    1. Install Windows 7 and use additional hard drives with data on them. In my case they used to be on an XP/Vista system. There will be no problems.

    2. Next, use the hard drives back with XP/Vista. There will be no problems.

    3. Now, use the hard drives again with Windows 7 and it will install automatically device drivers for these hard drives requiring restart. After the restart the drives will not be available in My Computer and the Disk Manager will show the entire drives with unallocated disk space.

    4. Use the hard drives back with Vista and they will be fine with the data showing again.

    What I don't understand is how Windows decides that certain hard drives need new device drivers. How come my drives worked perfectly right after the installation with Windows 7 but once used with Vista, then back with Windows 7 they got automatically new device drivers. And why installing device dirvers has to render the disks as unallocated space when they already have perfectly healthy working data with previous Windows systems.

    This makes dual boot of almost no use when using multiple HDD systems, and such a flaw is simply unacceptable. To make a long story short, how to make W7 recognize my HDDs with the data in it AFTER I used them on an XP/Vista OS.

    Original Question/Issue here

    • Answers
  • surfasb

    I've seen this before. I regularly see this when I have drives setup with eSata. Generally, I never restart. But I've never had the driver just not show up. Sounds more like a motherboard problem, because technically Windows doesn't even know which drives are hooked up. BIOS does. And BIOS tell windows what drives are there.


    • Related Question

    windows 7 - 3 OS computer, Hard Drives Corrupted, Any way to save the data?
  • Sean

    I have a computer. Its a pretty amazing computer. I built it myself. It has 3 500gb hard drives in it, all with different OS's: XP, Vista, and 7.

    Some how, it seems ALL 3 have gotten corrupted. one day I turned on my computer, I booted up XP. It gets to the loading screen, then BAM! a crash screen flashes on the screen (a 0x00000007 code) it automatically resets after that, so... logically, since that one stopped working, I figured I'd try getting booting Windows 7.

    Windows 7 gets stuck on Startup Repair. And of course startup repair is unproductive and cannot find any problems. So I opened the command prompt and perform a disk check. It FINDS NO ERRORS! WTF right? So I try vista next and it won't even start because it says kdcom.dll is missing or corrupt.

    What is really funny about all this is with Windows 7 and XP SOMETIMES it actually manages to pass the loading screens and I can use them like I normally would.

    I'm pretty sure my data is safe because sometimes I can still access it. Is there anyway I could save the data, because I have like 400gb of data. After the problem started I moved all the collective data from all the hard drives onto the windows 7 hard drive, because that is the one that actually works most often.

    So could I take that hard drive out and put it in one of those cases that allows you to connect it to another computer through USB, and transfer all the data there, or get a nice big external hard drive and pull the data off that way?

    I realize that I'm gonna have to wipe the hard drives and reinstall windows on all of them. I just want to be able to put all my data back after doing that.


    • Related Answers
  • RedGrittyBrick

    The chances of three drives failing simultaneously are very small. More likely you have a hardware failure elsewhere, perhaps in the disk controller, perhaps in memory, perhaps elsewhere on the motherboard.

    I have an IDE/SATA to USB adapter I use to test drives on other computers, to migrate data etc, I would check the drives on another computer and run diagnostics on the faulty PC.

  • Velociraptors

    Yes, you can use a hard drive enclosure to connect your drives to a different computer to copy your data to a new location. You can also use an Ubuntu live CD or flash drive (or other Linux distro if you prefer) to boot your computer and copy your data that way.