Windows 7: Disk has 0 bytes used and 0 bytes free

hey Guys,

I had a very healthy version of XP media center formatted with NTFS FS. I had my D drive as the OS drive and my C drive was my storage drive...dont ask how it got there but it was a series of me playing around with Disk mirroring and drive swapping.

Anyway when I upgraded to windows 7, it now parked my D drive as my C drive and my C drive is now my D drive...no problem there however windows sees the drive as being 0 bytes in size and 0 bytes used. In my BIOS everything is still fine however Windows cant see my 500GB drive. I also noticed I have the option to set the partition active where I the other drive has this option greyed out. Should I set this partition to be active? Will this erase any data on my drive?

THanks

SG

I helped someone else out in the exact problem as you.

I'll give you the information. You're definitely welcome to ask questions, but I suppose it's up to you to decide what you want to do.

In his situation, he could boot to another operating system (XP and Vista) to access the drive but under 7, it had 0 bytes.

So I had him copy everything he needs off the drive in the other OS. Then I told him to low level format the drive. After doing that, the drive was read well inside Windows 7.

My best advice to you is to backup the hard drive by any means possible to another storage medium. Even if that means taking the drive out of your computer and placing it in another one running XP or Vista.

Then perform a low level format on it once you are satisfied your data is secure on the backup medium.

Hey Torrentg,

Ultimately I will be moving the drive to an external disk. I was hoping it was a bit more simpler than that but Id rather not risk my data like you said.

how do I perform a low level format? Is this an option in Widnows 7? Also I am assuming this will remove all the data from the drive correct?

Thanks for your help.

Low level format makes it as close as possible to the condition the drive was in as brand new, that an end user can perform. So yes, all data will be completely wiped.

You can visit the website of the manufacturer of the hard drive for a low level format utility. Low level format is much different than the standard format users generally do to disks, such as to NTFS or FAT32.