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Hard disk Info Recovery

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Hi People, Im having a very strange issue with my hard drive.
The drive is a 40 MB seagate Ide, somehow suddenly appears as a 20 mb HD, and worked correctly, the problem came in when I installed a new 80 MB Disk as primary, to replace the old one.
At first boot up computer BIOS recognized both, one as 80 MB and the old one as 20 MB and everything was ok, untill machine reboots after Windows XP professional installation on the new disk. Bios did not recognize none of the disks. At the moment i entered BIOS set up and run the drive auto configuration computer recognizes both with their correct size 80 and 40MB and now I cannot read the secondary disk.Machine is using a Soyo motherboard and an athlon 2500 XP processor.
I already tried to set up manually the old disk alone in the computer but data are inaccesible.
As far I remember, the old idsk was upgraded from win ME so maybe was not formatted in NTFS filesystem. Anyone of you can help me to try to recover that information?. I havent tried so much after this to avoid lost information in case its already there. Thanx

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To recover the data (not the OS) on a HD. Download a Live Linux CD. Get either SimplyMepis or Knoppix, google them to find their web pages. You will need to Burn the ISO image to CD-ROM, Boot from the CD-ROM, and then mount the Problem Drive. Make sure the BIOS sees all 40MB of the drive. With either of these Linux CD-ROMs you should be able to copy any data that remains on the disk. Whether it is FAT32 or NTFS. You will need to know what it is, although it should be detected.

It does sound like the disk has been repartitioned, and in that case this process is more advanced and requires some special software. It could be that the partition table is corrupted somehow. You might try getting Partition Magic, it will fix some partition errors.

Good Luck,

Job Cacka

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Hi,

The first thing to check is your cable/jumper configuration. You need to make sure that you have the jumpers set correctly and that they are connected to the IDE channels that you want. Your 80GB drive which it seems that you want this as your main boot drive. So, plug this drive into IDE 1 and set it as Master. Now, Your 40 GB will be your secondary drive. If you want this plugged into IDE 1 you will set the jumper to slave, but if you want to use IDE 2 set it as master, and if you have a optial drive, on IDE 2 set that as your slave. Now, if you check all that and your completly sure that it is right. you have a bigger problem. But your bios will pick up the drives even if they are configured wrong, but to get them to work you need to make sure they are configured correctly.

hope that could help
Rick

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Do hope you are talking in GB not MB as ME and XP will eat up a 2 & 5 GB (respectively) portion of a HD.

Do not believe you have a drive problem unless they are set up wrong (see answers above), you may have a drive overlay program problem. Most HD’s come setup for CS (cable select) the OEM 40GB HD was probably set for master and no other drives, change to slave or CS and you should be fine. If you used the OEM supplied disk to overlay the drive to allow the PC to read a large drive then that could be your problem, follow directions in the manual to remove the program, format the HD and reload XP.

CD burner onboard, use the original drive by itself and burn all data you want to keep to CD. Or (bite my tongue) put the data on floppies.

ME more than likely was not NTFS, Windows was not real NTFS friendly at that stage of development for home use.

BTW – As long as you have not tried to save files to the old HD all data should still be there.

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Sorry , yes im talking in GB

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Hi! For correct jumper set, try even the cable select option too. There are some HDD what work correct just with cable select jumper set. You must try all the possibility, that means put the two drive to the same IDE cable, and different jumper selections, (one master other slave, both cable select, one master other cable select ?.). After try one drive one IDE cable, other the second IDE cable and all jumpers set possibility.

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In addition to the suggestions already noted it might be helpful to connect one of the drives to the cable presently used by the CD/DVD ROM (it should be the only device on that cable. That to a degree eliminates any issue of making the two drives play well on one cable and allows you to address possibly more fundamental issues. Removing at least one variable always simplifies trouble shooting.

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Hi people, thanx for your support, in this days i?ve tried all possibilities about cable and jumper configuration, also tried partition magic recovery boot disk, and the information I get is that in the 40 GB disk there is no active partitions, detect 2 partitions on disk one not identified about 6 gb and the rest as other identified as fat 32.
Checking witgh PQmagic installed in the 80 GB disk and checking both disks, the 40 mb one appears as unallocated.
Maybe i need some tool for extracting the info if it still there

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If you are not sure of the correct jumper settings, go to the HDD manufacturer’s site on the internet and look up the drive. The jumper settings will be specified there and you can eliminate any question of correct jumper configuration from your troubleshooting process.

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One of the things you did not say was the jumper settings on the hard drive. The 40gb hard drive should be set as a “SLAVE” and the 80gb as the “MASTER”. These are on the rear of the hard drive typically between the cable connector and the power connector.

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Try this link to sysinternals emergency recovery. It allows for a 5 day full version. It might, atleast tell you if the info is accessible.
http://www.winternals.com/Products/EmergencyDownload/

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Another possibility is that your hard drive could have been infected with a virus and damaged your master boot record. If you believe that the drive was infact FAT32, set it up as a standalone master and boot using a bootable floppy with the FDISK utility on it. at the prompt type FDISK /MBR to try and recover the master boot record.

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