Hard Drive Help!

beejjacobs · 10 Mar 2012 at 23:48

Trying to copy some data for a friend, and have installed his two HDDs into my PC. However, one won't come up in explorer. Checking Disk Management it says:

"The disk is offline because it has a signature collision with another disk that is online"

Any ideas what this means? I can't assign the drive a letter or anything.

If it makes any difference they have both come from a PC from another manufacturer. And both have a 1.28GB partition "recovery partition" which I cannot remove or do anything with.

Any help would be appreciated.

CaptainCrash · 10 Mar 2012 at 23:59

The first hit I got in Google was this: http://www.laurentkempe.com/post/Windows-7-Disk-is-offline-because-it-has-a-signature-collision.aspx

Any use?

beejjacobs · 11 Mar 2012 at 00:01

Thank you. I will try that. I don't know what part of me didn't think to try a quick Google :s

beejjacobs · 11 Mar 2012 at 00:04

That worked. Thanks. Hardly a uniqueID if two drives can have the same one. I wonder what sets it.

MagicBoy · 11 Mar 2012 at 00:12

Most likely it was partitioned off the same master image. The odds on a random collision are pretty high.

beejjacobs · 11 Mar 2012 at 00:31

MagicBoy said:
Most likely it was partitioned off the same master image. The odds on a random collision are pretty high.

Ah okay. I did think it was odd how they were set up. One was 1TB and the other 500GB, but they had exactly the same size partitions on! Still all sorted and copying now