Moving External Hard Drive to Internal

I have a hard drive, a Western Digital Caviar 300 GB, that I was using
in an external drive kit. I've got it more than half full, about 180
GB, of backups that I don't want to lose. I had another external, but
since I carry them around a lot, it eventually was detroyed by a
serious drop and I lost all my data. I'd like to keep that from
happening again, so what I want to do is take that external drive, and
put it into a file storage tower (running XP) as a slave drive. No
RAID arrays or anything (yet) just a master and slave on a single IDE
ribbon.

Here's the issue: When I hook it up to my file server, all that XP sees
is a 120 GB space of unformatted nothingness. Attempting to access the
drive brings up a prompt to format it.

If I had the extra space anywhere else, I'd copy everything off the
drive, reformat it, copy it back, and be on my merry way, but I don't
have that kind of room on any drive and DVDs are too pricey to be using
so many.

I thought the file system might have been the issue; the external drive
was formatted NTFS and the master drive on the file server was FAT32.
I converted the data on the FAT32 drive to NTFS and still nothing.

I had the drive set to master when it was being used as an external,
and now it's set to slave. I don't think that would have any impact,
but I don't know for sure.

So can this be done without losing all my data, or do I have to leave
it as an external?

Thanks in advance
~Dan Hansen

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Relevant Pages

  • Re: Moving External Hard Drive to Internal
    ... RAID arrays or anything just a master and slave on a single IDE ... When I hook it up to my file server, ... to install a large HD, ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
  • Re: Moving External Hard Drive to Internal
    ... RAID arrays or anything just a master and slave on a single IDE ... When I hook it up to my file server, ... to install a large HD, ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
  • Re: What Did I Do ?
    ... C drive set as master, D drive set as slave on Primary ... >>Contoller card. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
  • Re: New Drive
    ... why add a second larger drive as a slave? ... buy a clone software, clone the old drive to the new drive set it for ... master, ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
  • Re: Replikations Frage
    ... vom Master auf den Slave kopiert hast und dabei die Permissions auf ... Die Datenbanken auf den Slave Server laufen ohne Probleme. ... # If you want to know which options a program support, ...
    (de.comp.datenbanken.mysql)