Windows 7 Told windows my second drive is CDFS its not.

[GRY086]

I wanted to make Windows 7 recognize my second hard drive. Following online instructions I went to
control panel --> computer management --> storage.
when the window opened it asked me what filetype the drive is. I accdentally/stupidly clicked CDFS.

now storage manager sees the disk, but tells me it is unalocated, furthermore i have no access to it through the OS.

I want to tell windows that my second drive is not CDFS, but all the tutorials i find online are telling me how to actually reformat drives- not what I want to do.

interesting note: I restarted my computer with the drive unplugged from serial ribon, thinking maybe re-plugging would prompt windows to ask me for the filesystem again. My computer won't start w/o the secondary, backup, purley storage disk plugged in now!

any help please?

 

[kemical]

To be honest I think the only way you going to get the drive back is to reformat it to NTFS..

 

[Saltgrass]

I want to tell windows that my second drive is not CDFS, but all the tutorials i find online are telling me how to actually reformat drives- not what I want to do.

What do you want to do?

 

[adduncan]

reformat it using Disk Management tools (same steps you took before)

 

[Digerati]

Why don't you want to reformat it? The only reason not to is if there is data on it you don't want to lose. But since you cannot access it, that seems like a moot point.

 

[GRY086]

The reason I won't reformat it is exactly because the data is still there. I won't easily accept on this one, because the back up disk is valuable to me. I know the data is there because the drive did not even spin when I stupidly changed it to CDFS. Deleting 111 GB takes time, this change was instantaneous.


Somehow I need to read this hard drive, without reformatting, and I know it can be done, i just don't know how. any tools?

Please no further advice on simply deleting the data, not helpful.

 

[adduncan]

Just had a quick look through a number of websites for some sort of help with this.

It seems the only way to use this drive normally is a format to fat32 or ntfs

 

[Digerati]

Well, you can try Link Removed, from the makers of CCleaner. or Link Removed due to 404 Error.