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Mumrik
01-16-2006, 05:49 PM
I’m having problems with my girlfriend’s secondary harddrive :(

The harddrive in question is a PATA Maxtor DiamondMax 10 250gb. and it has only been in use for a few months during which it’s been used for media storage (photos, video, mp3s).

I’ve been trying to solve some stability problems on her PC (not related to said HDD), and yesterday I ended up reinstalling Windows XP SP2 (upgrade style) which to my horror resulted in Windows no longer recognizing the drive’s partition :eek:

The drive no longer shows up in explorer, but it’s recognized in the BIOS and windows conciders it unallocated diskspace. XP-SP2 should be able to handle the drive size, and just to make sure, I even installed the reg-hack from Maxtor’s site. I’ve also tried putting the drive on its own IDE-channel but that didn’t do any difference. S.M.A.R.T. hasn’t said anything...

I’ve downloaded the Ultimate Boot CD (http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/) but since I don’t have any experience with any of the software on it, I’m not quite sure where to go from here. I did a quick scan with Maxtor's software which didn't find any problems...


What’s going on here? Is the file system or MBR (does a secondary drive even have one?) fucked up? Do you guys have any advice on this situation?

Losing this data would be horrible for my girlfriend – it’s all the pictures she ever took, not to mention the videos and music...



System:
AXP2500+ on an MSI nForce2 IGP based motherboard (using the integrated).
512mb. DDR (which I think may be causing the instability)
Primary HDD is a 120gb. Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 (PATA)

Dr3wStx
01-16-2006, 07:29 PM
Right click "my computer" then click manage. Then look under the "disk management" tab, is the drive listed there? If so, convert it to a basic disk (or whatever option it gives you)

Mumrik
01-17-2006, 01:14 AM
It's there, described as "unallocated diskspace", but wouldn't converting it destroy the data?

dark_azure
01-18-2006, 11:00 AM
Your hard disk may lost partition table.
I suggest you try to download some software which could repair harddisk's partition table.
Try to search key words "partition table repair software" in gooooooooogle.
Good luck~! :cool:

Mumrik
01-18-2006, 06:54 PM
It lives!!

Thank you for all your help, the partition was easily recovered with Acronis. It took less than a minute.