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Hard Drive For Storage is now missing files

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8 replies

by beldave

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So I had a Maxtor 120g IDE HDD as my primary and a second Maxtor 200g IDE HDD as my slave. Wanted to upgrade the 120 to a 300 IDE, so I backed up everything to my 200g slave and then installed windows and partioned the new 300g drive into 2 spaces. When I finally got XP updated with Service Pack2, the slave drive was not there. So I used the Disk Management tool, which recognized the drive and said that it was unallocated space. It somehow didn't recognize that it's already formatted with NTFS and has a good 150gigs worth of stuff on it. So I can't access the slave or its info and when I reconnected my old 120 to check and see if the slave was operational - it also (windows i mean) wouldn't let me open it with out a formatting. So what's the deal - i didn't format the slave - just the new primary and installed the OS on it. Nothing touched that slave and now its acting like its a brand new drive with no file system on it. Is there a way to fix that - or do I have to go the file recovery program route and then reformatt the slave?

8 replies

by beldave

oh and when I used the Disk Management tool I had it partion the slave drive, with no format - thinking that might resolve it.

by bdmitinc

This is where everyone is sitting here looking at your post and thinking "Wow! Sux to be you dude!" The first thing I would do is slave it into a different computer and see if you get the same thing. the partioning that you did was bad but not the end of the world. If you get the same results from a different computer then your basicly in trouble and I think that you should invest in some good recovery software. I have had this problem before where one computer would not read the drive no matter what but another worked just fine. hope this helps.

by langlier

use it first and foremost.

if that does not work then use a program such as Partition magic to verify the file structure. Were there any drive overlays that may have been applied? (Norton GoBack is a big problemmaker because of this)

by beldave

There were no overlays at all - and I can't run checkdisk because the drive itself doesn't show up as a viable drive under my computer. So how do you check it?

by older mycroft

And stick your HDD in his/her tower as a slave and then run chkdsk from there.

by hal 9000

But make sure that you set the Jumper to Master if that's an option or Cable Select if there is no Master Option available.

Then plug it into a USB Port and see what if anything is on the drive. I would also check the Jumper Settings on both Drives just in case there is a problem there as well. As the BIOS is recognizing a 300 GIG Drive I would tend to think that this is a fairly new M'Board at least though having 2 IDE Drives on it is a bit confusing as most of the newer M'Boards will only have the 1 IDE connector on them and then 6 or 8 SATA Connectors.

But by fitting the drive to a USB Caddy you are effectively using it on another computer which should pickup any Partition Information on the drive.

Now this is [b]Really Important DO NOT DO ANYTHING AT ALL TO THE DRIVE!!!!![/b] It has all your data on it and if you mess it up it's going to cost a lot of money to recover the data and maybe even result int he destruction of the HDD.

I would recommend attaching this drive to a different computer and attempting to read it before going any further but if that fails to work you will need some Data Recovery Software the best being On Tracks EasyRecovery? Software but it's not the cheapest option and is available for a look see here

http://preview.tinyurl.com/2xsvtz

A cheaper alternative is Stella's Product available here but it doesn't do as good a job as the On Track version

http://preview.tinyurl.com/djw6u

Then you have a host of other Data Recovery software available but they fall into 2 distinct categories 1 being a In Place Recovery or Rebuild of the MBR's of the affected drive and the other being a recovery of files from the affected drive that need to be copied to another HDD or some different Media to prevent overwriting data that is still on the HDD that is affected the following is a list of the better packages available and while not a full list are the ones that I have heard good things about

http://preview.tinyurl.com/pfuhz

http://preview.tinyurl.com/273ay5

http://preview.tinyurl.com/29g7pn

http://preview.tinyurl.com/yyk8cm

http://preview.tinyurl.com/382vm

The Recovery Agent here

http://preview.tinyurl.com/2g8rv

http://preview.tinyurl.com/70lc

Only look at Davory here and [b]Do Not[/b] look at X Ways unless you know HEX Inside Out!

http://www.x-ways.net/davory/index-m.html

If you want some idea of what is involved in Forensic Recovery this is one of the best Web Pages on the Internet but should only be used for education purposes unless you really know what it is that you are doing as it will cause far more damage that anything else if you try it without knowing exactly what you are doing.

http://www.x-ways.net/forensics/index-m.html

Col

by beldave

It won't check the drive - only the primary drive. It says that it is unable to check this type of drive. It lists the file system as RAW and I can't get it to open or do anything without a formatt. So I'm thinking the data recovery route?

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