Am I just out of luck? Data loss...

Dayvon

Weaksauce
Joined
Oct 6, 2004
Messages
117
So here's the rub. I put a new video card in my machine. I took it apart (it's a microatx) and did alot of cleanup and re-ran cables and so on. I Put the machine back together and plugged everything in and booted up. Install new video drivers blah blah blah...

I went later to load up a video off of my media drive and no dice. The link to the drive doesn't work, and I check and the drive isnt there. I opened up the case to start checking that cables are plugged in (while windows XP is still running) cause I can't figure out what else would be the problem. I'm looking at them and they all seem plugged in. I pushed on the SATA power cable on one of the drives, and apparently it wasn't pushed in all the way. The drive spins up and I'm like "sweet, I found the problem". So after a bit, I reboot the system to check it out.

And...... it's gone. Apparently, the drive is currently unrecognized and is listed as RAW needing initialization. The drive was 2 NTFS partitions split into 500GB chunks. I proceeded to use a couple data recovery demos that were recommended in other forum threads. No luck yet. One software seemed to recognize that there was two partitions, but it didn't seem to do anything else.

Am I just screwed here because I "plugged in the drive" in windows xp? Or is there something I'm missing? Does anyone have any thoughts about the recoverability of this drive?

Thanks for any help!
 
What manufacturer and model drive do you have? Would it be a Seagate 7200.11 by chance?
 
From a recovery s/w POV, R-Studio seems to be well recommended. Not sure if that is the one you used. Not that it will help I think but is there anything in the windows event log that might shed any light on this. I doubt it completely since it wasn't show in Windows etc but you never know I guess. You could also check the SATA power lead and make sure that hasn't got damaged. If you were really really lucky it might be that which is at fault.
 
Yes I tried RStudio with no luck. I don't think it's a seagate, why do you ask?
 
You wouldn't have an issue with powering up a drive while Windows is running (I've personally done it hundreds of times, but I could be lucky I suppose).

Have you tried a different SATA cable? Different SATA port? Just in case.
 
Hmmmm maybe I'll try different ports. It could be possible that Windows doesn't recognize it because of this. Any other thoughts are welcome!
 
One last thing, if you have a live linux cd like Ubuntu or Crunchbang (crunchbang automounts drives usually, and Ubuntu is huge obviously) you could see if the data is accessible in that fashion. If it is, then you could rule out data corruption and/or hardware issues.
 
Tried pretty much everything suggested here with no luck yet. If no one else has any ideas, I may see about professional recovery solutions.
 
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