Ghost hard drive?

Hi all.

Why does a hard drive that's full of data show up in Disk Manager as "unformatted"?

Here's what happened, in order.

200Gb WD hard drive, system drive with Win XP Pro. System froze up during a system restore and never booted to Windows again. Error message was: Missing operating system. Clearly the system restore screwed up Windows. Upon inspection, the IDE cable was also faulty. It was replaced, but nothing changed.

I added a new WD 160Gb, loaded XP on it, works fine. The old 200Gb is now set as slave... and Disk Manager recognizes it as unformatted, while it's not: there's a lot of data on it. The original partitions on the disk (one 100Gb, one 80Gb) are still there, but one is unformatted and the other is unallocated.

This does not make any sense. The original system restore surely screwed up Windows, but the data must still be there. The disk passes the SMART test. It shows up in WD Diagnostic Tools under physical drives (status: Good) but not under logical units.

At this point, I'm at a loss. Any help is GREATLY appreciated.

try to get ahold of Partition doctor, it's great at recovering stuff like this. Also, a downloadable ISO of MiniXPE would be of great use (partition doctor and many others a re built in) now and in the future, as a boot CD. It has tons of diagnostic, repair and recovery tools on the bootable image. Download it, and burn it, and boot it.

Or just get PartedMagic and run with it. Legal, free, etc... Highly recommended for partitioning duties if required.

Most of those "all in one" PE discs out there floating around - with the exception of the UltimateBootCD4Win (www.ubcd4win.com) have some commercial software on 'em which makes 'em a no-no for discussion around here. UBCD4Win is all legit, all open source stuff with no issues, and tons of tools to accomplish whatever you need accomplished.

Right now I've been able to scan the drive with R-Studio (demo) and I've confirmed that all the files are there. Obviously the demo cannot recover them, and I won't spend $180 for the full version... but it's good to know I've something to work with that another software might be able to accomplish.

Thanks a lot for the replies! I'll download both softwares and see what works.

Sounds to me like the drive may have been damaged by the faulty cable, resulting in the erratic behavior you have observed...get your data off if you can, try reformatting it...but its probably done for.