Eric Gisin wrote:

Yes, you need the signature before a drive can be used on Win 2K+.
I suspect they zapped it with fdisk/mbr, causing the problems.


Thanks Eric. And putting the signature on the drive will not put the
data that is on the disk at risk?

Steve


"Steve Cousins" wrote in message
...

A researcher gave me a 320 GB SATA drive from a Windows XP machine
that he wants to have access to. I put it in a Windows 2000 machine
and in "Disk Management" it shows up as "Unknown". The only option
appears to be "Write Signature". Could doing this be a bad thing as
far as being able to access the data on the disk?

I have used "FinalData Enterprise" to see if there is data on the
drive and it finds two NTFS partitions with data. All looks fine. I
can use this to get the data now but it would obviously be better to
have it accessible the normal way. I just don't want to write the
"Signature" and then find that I can't even get the data via Final
Data. I doubt if this would happen but I'm not up on Windows so I'd
like some advice.

As far as I can tell from what searching I've done, the Write
Signature command just deals with the MBR. It is also used to go to
a Dynamic Drive which I don't want to do. Would doing a fdisk /MBR
be better?