Disk partition issue

[TheGreatGrrrr]

Afternoon all, I've spent the best part of today installing new hard drives, moving from a 32GB Raptor, a 160GB Deskstar and a 320GB Deskstar (all SATA) to an 80GB Intel SSD and two 1TB Samsung F3's.

So, got the new bits, popped them in, I'd previously moved stuff from the Raptor to the 320GB Deskstar, with the intention of installing Windows 7 on the SSD, booting into Windows and dragging my stuff from the 160GB drive and the 320GB drive to one of the 1TB drives, then taking those two out and popping the other 1TB drive in to raid 1 it with the other. I updated the firmware on the drive (was up to date anyway) changed the SATA mode to AHCI from IDE, installed Windows 7, plugged the 160, 320 and 1TB drives. When I got into Windows the 320GB drive showed up fine, as did the 1TB drive after initializing and partitioning it, but the 160GB showed up as a foreign drive (something along those lines anyway) in the disk manager. I got my stuff from the 320GB drive, unplugged it and the 160GB, then used a converter to plug the 160GB drive in via USB, hoping it would just show up as normal, but in the disk manager it now shows up as unallocated and wants me to initialize it.

There's the background, my questions are, how do I get onto the drive without destroying the partitions on it (there were two, ~30GB and then the rest), will initializing the disk break it? Was changing the SATA mode a mistake, if so why did the other drive work?

Appreciate any help anyone can give.

 

[rpstewart]

Sounds like the 160Gb might be formatted as a dynamic disk. If your version of Win 7 supports dynamic disks (Home Premium doesn't) then you can import it as a foreign disk in Disk Management if you right click on the grey part to the left of the partition graph. The disk will need to be installed internally though, you can't have external dynamic disks.

 

[TheGreatGrrrr]

Sounds like the 160Gb might be formatted as a dynamic disk. If your version of Win 7 supports dynamic disks (Home Premium doesn't) then you can import it as a foreign disk in Disk Management if you right click on the grey part to the left of the partition graph. The disk will need to be installed internally though, you can't have external dynamic disks.

Thanks for that, I didn't want to risk importing the foreign disk and losing my partitions, or initialising it as an external drive and ruining it. I've plugged it in internally and imported it as a foreign disk, it was a dynamic disk, and I'm running Windows 7 Home Premium, it's shown up fine! Saves me a lot of hassle.

Cheers.