I have four western digital hard drives and decided to format and reinstall windows xp on the boot drive. I applied all of the xp updates before doing anything else. After all that when I looked over the hard drives in "my computer" I noticed that the letter assignment had changed on one and the "capacity" and "free space" columns were blank on another. I used to have to manually configure support for large hard drives and install a driver for my Promise 100tx controller card however when I went to do this a box came up telling me windows had installed a better driver. The drive with empty capacity and free space numbers is showing up as "raw" and I am asked if I want to do a format. On the drive with the letter change I am able to browse the entire directory structure however most of the files are corrupt. Some of the video files will play random segments from other files, others will lock up programs and a few are just fine. Chkdsk /r did not change anything. The third drive is totally fine. It is as if reinstalling widows has corrupted the fat. I have not been able to find any ideas of a good way to reconstruct the fat on these other drives after an XP reinstall or why this problem occurs.

BTW, chkdsk /r hangs at %2 on stage 3 of 4

ouch! stay away from chkdsk till you know whats going on. Disconnect the 3 drives, reformat the system drive and reinstall xp - no updates, only those drivers you know that worked previously.
Then reconnect one of the 3 other drives one at a time and see what you have from there.

Correct - make it a practice to disconnect all drives on system before installing windows on the master drive. Have seen this with clients systems many times and plus if you search there is some old posts on this subject you can read on.

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Iorana Haraharaini

UPDATE--

As part of the troubleshooting process I disconnected all of the HDs except for the boot. I then reconnected them one at a time to the slave part of the primary ide cable from the motherboard, bypassing the promise 100tx ata pci controller card. I actually removed the promise card entirely. I just tested the HD that had mostly corrupt and broken files. It has a few totally unreadable files, however the majority that were corrupt though the promise card are in perfect condition when using the motherboard cable. I am guessing the unreadable ones were made that way by running chkdsk. Just as a note, everything, all HDs and the promise card, were working perfectly under a fully updated windows XP before I formatted the boot drive and reinstalled XP. It is my guess that when reinstalling and putting in all the updates somewhere along the way XP (SP 2?) put in a driver for the promise card that is bad, or at least screws up large disk access LBA support. After all the updates I tried to install the promise driver from the WD web site but windows wouldn't allow it because it "had a better driver installed", yea right. It did not even give me an option to overwrite the windows version. By installing the promise driver on my original installation, before SP 1 or 2 were available, I must have declined or not been offered Microsoft's "improved" promise driver. So now my question is, is there any way I can force XP to install the older driver, or do I need to do another full reinstall of XP? If I do the reinstall how can I be sure to prevent XP from overwriting the promise driver if it is buried in a service pack?