Data Lost?

[MoDsOuRcEdOtNeT]

I just built a new system, it is my first build. The system has two IDE hard drives, one new seagate 80 GB which is running windows and the other is a 200 GB Maxtor diamond max 10 which was about 1/2 ful of data. after getting the system to boot, it will recognize the maxtor but only as 74.5 GB and it is reportedly not formatted. is there any hope i can get my data back , and if so how should i go about doing it?

[MoDsOuRcEdOtNeT]

bump

[drizzt81]

can you post a screenshot of what you are seeing?
WinXP SP2 is installed, right?

[MoDsOuRcEdOtNeT]

Yes, XP Pro SP2
The drive "E:" should actually be two partitions each of about 100GB
http://img218.imageshack.us/img218/131/hdderroroj1.jpg

The fact that both harddrives (the 80 and 200) are 74.53 gb is weird. Could my MBR be corrupt?

[drizzt81]

have you taken a look at it in disk management?

start->run->compmgmt.msc

[MoDsOuRcEdOtNeT]

When i look at it in Disk Managment it says that it is 74.53 GB and that everything is healthy. (Drive E)
http://img226.imageshack.us/img226/3456/diskmanagmentsj4.jpg

[drizzt81]

ok, let's go step by step:
1. does it show up in the BIOS with the correct capacity? Is the BIOS set to auto detect it?
2. Which IDE channel is it connected to? If it shares a channel with another device, is it jumpered correctly?
3. Have you tried it on a channel by itself?
4. Can you try the drive in another PC?

[MoDsOuRcEdOtNeT]

1. No, in BIOS it shows it as 80 GB, Yes it is set to auto detect it
2. Channel 1 ( with the other hard drive), yes it is jumpered correctly
3. No, i did not think about running it on its own channel i will try that shortly
4. Other system also saying that it is not formatted and has no data

any more ideas or thigs that you see that might be wrong are welcome.

[drizzt81]

if the BIOS sees it as an 80GB drive, there is a problem with either the jumpers or the cable or the drive is shot (for some reason).

See what happens if you put it on its own channel as the master device.

[MoDsOuRcEdOtNeT]

if the BIOS sees it as an 80GB drive, there is a problem with either the jumpers or the cable or the drive is shot (for some reason).

See what happens if you put it on its own channel as the master device.

The jumpers are fine, as is the cable [Ill try switching them though]. I doubt the drive should be shot as all I did was move it from my old comp to new one.

Putting it as a master drive on its own channel didnt do anything.

Edit: A recovery program was able to see my old partitons on the disk, but it was a demo so I couldnt recover anything.

I used another program to try to fix the partiton table. But now the recovery program cant even see the partitions so Im going to install DSL and try to get it off that, if that fails, I'll try ubuntu. Otherwise I see a format in the future.

[Asgorath]

Download spinrite. It costs money but it's worth it. If you crawl through the seedy cellars of the internet you will also find bad people giving it away. But I cannot condone anything on the sort.

[MoDsOuRcEdOtNeT]

Spinrite ran. But windows still couldnt see the disk so it was no good. Spinrite only saw 80/200 gb anyway also.


Linux could almost mount it, but the harddrive is not reporting a filesystem so I wasnt able to mount it with knowing what filesystem it could magically have changed to.

Tried rebuilding the MBR to no avail.

[onick]

that is exactly what happened to me 3-4 years ago with a Samsung 40 GB drive. i have been using it for around 6 months and suddently one morning all my partitions were gone and the drive was showing as a unformatted local disk. the drive size was showing something like 200GB plus, i could format it, but couldn't save any files on the disk. so, i pretty much knew, i was screwed. so i sent it to the shop and they replace it. fortunately the new drive is still going strong.

[Asgorath]

Well, I don't know how to fix your drive, but try http://www.runtime.org/products.htm , getDataBack for Fat or NTFS. I've tried it a few times. It works.