Righto, my mate has called to say that he is moving away from his desktop and onto a laptop.  He has a 120GB IDE drive which is full of his data, he has popped it onto his laptop by way of USB caddie.  Now the problem is that the lappy say the drive is of type "foreign" and has no drive letter.  Having checked internet and on MS support page says that dynamic drives dont work on laptops? Well that is what he has told me .... we do not have another hard drive to copy data to.  He has a small 20GB boot drive with XP on the desktop so not much use there.  

Right then, you are to be crowned "the daddy!" if you are first to solve this problem .... (need some incentive!).

stick the HDD back into the original PC. Network cable between PC and laptop...copy the data across.

Or make sure that the HDD in the caddy has the correct jumper setting based on whatever the caddy says it needs.

Does the disk show up in Disk Manager ?

Was it actually spanning over disks?

Im thinking that you might want to boot up with Knoppix and copy the data over form one disk to another.  

it wont work because USB hard drives have to be formated to FAT32 and itll be NTFS

cant really think of a good cure, really need to stick it another PC, copy everything off, format it to FAT32 then copy everything back ?

Quote from: knightyit wont work because USB hard drives have to be formated to FAT32 and itll be NTFS

Damn, i must tell mine it isnt _really_ working then

Quote from: knightyit wont work because USB hard drives have to be formated to FAT32 and itll be NTFS

cant really think of a good cure, really need to stick it another PC, copy everything off, format it to FAT32 then copy everything back ?

roflmao... no no they dont.

Right click drive in drive management select "import".

Only problem being is if it was part of a spanned volume then you will need the other drive imported too.

So just to confirm; if my mate right clicks the drive in disc management and selects import it will see all the data???

Basically, networking is out of the question as the laptop does not have enough space.  (lappy has 40GB and the drive is a 120GB IDE - which is why he bought a USB caddy for it)

What are the options??  

im the daddy.

He can try  to "populate" the disk through device manager. Find the USB device & look in its properties.

Quote from: mrtSo just to confirm; if my mate right clicks the drive in disc management and selects import it will see all the data???

Basically, networking is out of the question as the laptop does not have enough space.  (lappy has 40GB and the drive is a 120GB IDE - which is why he bought a USB caddy for it)

What are the options??  

A foreign designation is given to a "dynamic" disk that hasnt been imported.

Only normal reason to use Dynamic disks is to create a large spanned volume. Sooo... if its part of a pair of drives thats infact a spanned volume then no he wont see all of the data. He will need to connect both disks at the same time in order to see the data.

However if its just a disk thats been made dynamic without using spanning or striping, then a right click -> import will import the disk, and windows XP will show the drive.

one othter thought, has he already got a drive letter assigned to the letter the drive inthe USB caddy used when it was inside the other box?  I know it should resolve itself since Win2K, but it doesnt always.