Let me try to explain this correctly, and if you have any other ideas than what I have tried, I would love to hear them!

I had a Seagate Barracuda IDE running XP (ntfs) on a home built. Removed mobo and hard drive (replaced with better mobo and SATA drive).

Anyways, I used the power supply from a donor case and hooked up the old mobo and Seagate, intending to retrieve the files onto an external drive. At this point, Windows tried to load, but refused. No response, couldn't log into Windows.

So, I tried Knoppix, couldn't mount the drive. Tried some XP recovery console options and couldn't get anywhere with that...although admittedly I am far from an expert in that area.

About the only thing that I got out of all that was that the file system is now FAT32. Why would that be?

I tried an enclosure (USB connection), and used disk management in XP. It sees the drive, calls it a dynamic disk, but it's unreadable. Does give the option to convert to a basic disk with data loss. I don't want to try that yet.

Thankfully I had backed up most of my stuff recently...there is just one file that I really would like to get. I suppose this is more of a curiosity thing at this point. Why would NTFS jump to FAT32? Is there a way to go back using recovery console, or Knoppix?

Mechanically, the disk is fine as far as I know. Spins up...just won't be recognized by anything.

Thanks in advance!

Just a gut feeling, but I suspect if you keep trying, you will eventually figure it out on your own. I think you'll discover the missing puzzle pieces.

Well, okay, it was worth a shot!

I just can't "connect the puzzle pieces" as the one person hoped I could do!

Did you try rebuilding your old system back together?

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image the drive to a good drive.
convert the dynamic to basic again. then find partition info and rebuild, wish will be solved. i got approximate a similar problem from one of my customer drive.

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THANK YOU
SHAHI
shahi.mahbub@gmail.com

Boss ,
PM Me More Details About Yourself Interested in Knowing you Better ,Also the solution Could Be Using any Good DR software for this Logical Issue

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Amarbir S Dhillon , Chandigarh Data Recovery Labs [India]
Logical,Semi Physical And Physical Data Recovery
Website-> http://www.chandigarhdatarecovery.com