Files erased during CHKDSK - lost > 100GB

[GranvilleX]

Help!

There's probably no way I can recover this data, but before giving up all hope and format the drive, I'll give it a try here among all you knowledgable and helpful people.

HDD1: IBM 75GXP - 46 GB
HDD2: Maxtor D540X-G4 - 160 GB
OS: W2K SP3

After having formatted HDD1 and reinstalled W2K, HDD2 which was connected to a PCI adapeter ATA133 card was not found. I then connected it directly to the motherboard and managed to get in touch with it, but after first having changed the jumper to cable select. It looked great. The second time I booted the computer, some files (doc, mp3) could not be read, so I rebooted, resulting in BSOD: STOP xxxx Inaccessible_Boot_Device.

Rebooting again resulted in CHKDSK automatically starting to run, deleting files, index entries, and replacing invalid security Ids, and then rebooting. It looked nice for a while… until I checked my HDD2 where I found that only 7GB out of my previous 114GB was to be found. I know I should have made a back-up, but 114GB… Norton Utilities said the disk is fine, but couldn’t retrieve anything with Unerase.

Does anyone have a possible solution? Is this data lost forever, or is there a way I can retrieve it?

Thankyou!

 

[jdunderhill]

It sounds to me it could be drive overlay software?, did you use a tool to install the second drive?, it might be that the details were held on the first drive and they have been deleted with the format, its only a guess but I think im on the right lines. The second drive now is limited to the 8GB because your BIOS hasn't been updated

 

[GranvilleX]

I sure would like to know the reason why chkdsk deletes data - it could happen again!

BIOS recognizes the full disk potential. And after formatting, I could still see it, but after a while it complained and ran chkdsk.

 

[markoff]

You may be able to get this data back but you're gonna have to put in some hours.

I've successfully recovered data in situations similar to this using the following products (in order from least powerful at the top to the most powerful at the bottom):

FileRevival (freeware I think)
Ontrack's EasyRecovery Pro
Powerquest Lost + Found
Tiramisu

The quicker the programs are understandably the less they do for you so you should be prepared to wait a while if/when you use Tiramisu .... especially considering that it'll be scanning 114Gigs of data. Don't despair though..... it's not impossible to get your data back .... it may turn out to be easy to do. Consider this, when you throw a file away, it's necessary to write zero's over that file several times in order to be sure it can't be read/recovered. If you can get the right llllllllllllllllllllllllllllThis is an interesting scenario for any and all techs looking for something utterly new. I'm a tech these last 8 years and I'm stumped.
The system:
Via P4XB-SA motherboard
400W power supply

I was trying to fix a problem with the machine rebooting ... everytime it was shut down it blue screened..... the stop error message was very similar to one associated with an EZCD Creator issue so I tried uninstalling EZCD creator and voilla, no more blue screen. Hooray.... now all I needed to do is put back the peripherals that were installed before I began my investigation ..... like the soundcard and network card..and swap the video card (client preference).

The video card that was currently in the machine was a Matrox and it worked fine. I stupidly decided to make all of the changes at once without checking the bios and I'm sure nobody will be surprised to hear it didn't boot .... it didn't even get far enough into the post to recognize the hard drives. It froze up immediately after checking the system RAM. There was one short beep early on (before the monitor had come up with a diplay) but no other audio indicators. The changes I'd made were:

- Swapped the Matrox display adapter for an ATI card that had worked in that machine previously.
- Put the NIC back into machine (again it'd worked there before).
- Put the Creative Labs Soundblaster Live card back (it'd also been working on that machine before).
- Lastly I added a zip drive to the primary ribbon cable with the zip set to be the slave device. The primary ide device was an 80GB ATA100 drive from IBM. It had been working fine in this machine and was only installed about 2 months ago after the inital hard drive failed. Note: the initial hard drive had gone bad in an odd way ... it wouldn't power up quickly enough for the POST to register it as present during a cold boot, but if you went into the BIOS and ran the utility to recognize the drives, it'd be there and you could do a warm boot from the bios and boot onto the problem drive without any trouble.


At this point I do the what I should have done before and started making one change at a time.... I pulled the nic and soundcard leaving the pci and iso slots all empty except for the pci ATI display adapter (I can't remember which model sorry) and nothing in the agp slot at all. I left the zip drive connected and rebooted the machine and exactly the same thing happened - it froze right after the memory test. I tried it again without the zip drive attached but there was no change. So I swapped the ATI video card out replacing it with the agp matrox that had been in that machine earlier that day. The computer was able to POST but now it's telling me I have no IDE devices on the primary IDE controller at all. At this point I was back where I started .... the machine should have been bootable because it was in exactly the same configuration that it had been when I was fixing the problem shutting down. Yet, now it won't boot and it says the primary master drive doesn't exist. Inspection of the primary master indicates it's not spinning up like it should... Repeated tests aren't even causing the drive to get/stay warm... I can feel a vibration in the drive so something is spinning in there but I can't say what. It appears that the drive could be malfunctioning similarly to the manner in which the first one had.

I'm wondering whether the ati card could have caused the problem; if it or the zip drive could have fried the hard drives electronic interface to such an extent that enough power no longer goes to the drive. Like I said I'm stumped..... anybody seen anything like this before?

markoff