Data recovery

[willywizz]

Bought a new 190Gb Maxtor hard drive and formatted normally. Noticed the disc space read 120 instead of the full 190 I used partition magic to get the full 190 gb and everything worked fine for a month or 2. Restarted my computer because a peculiar system error came up when I tried to open firefox and upon restarting, the computer thinks my hard drive is unformatted with no partitions and no data.

-quick formatted hard drive because my computer registered it as unformatted
-analysed it with Handy Recovery 2, I can see some of my files but they are spread out across 100s of randomly named folders
-I can recover some small AVI and jpeg files but most other files do not work when I recover them in particular no PSD (Photoshop) files work.

I don't need to recover the entire hard drive, I may not need to recover anything but I would like to be able to see a coherent list of the original folders and files just in case there is something important on there that I forgot about.

If anyone can help me with recovering or just seeing the data I would be very grateful

 

[wolluf]

Google for other data recovery apps. also there are a fair few recommended here (eg, getdataback). You may be unlucky regarding a 'coherent list' - the nature of data recovery often means that's exactly what you don't get - you have to search through what's recoverable.

The initial partitioning problem - sounds like 48 bit LBA mode issue (bios/operating system can't recognise over 128GB). I'm wondering what PM did to overcome it (does 'formatted normally' mean using disk management in XP?).

 

[mainegeek]

willywizz,

Maybe try GetDataBack as wolluf has mentioned. It is a good program.

Maybe PM original installed a drive overlay that got corrupt? I don't use PM so I am not all that familiar with it.

Perhaps when you get this sorted you might want to consider
spliting the 190gig into 2 seperate partitions with XP's disk management and leave PM out of the equation?