Partition Disappeared

[DavidPaul]

I was using my 2nd HDD which is a Maxtor 15Gb temporarily as my primary drive as to test Windows XP on. Before installing I physically removed my main drive and installed XP on the 15gig. Afterwards I found it was still unstable and so formatted it in dos and loaded Win2K on it. That crashed during the setup, so I put my main drive back in as the boot drive and put my 15gig back onto slave. Once in windows I formatted the XP partition of the 15gig. Since the 15gig was partitioned into 4 drives my data was still intact. So after formatting I start spreading data back over onto the partition that had just been formatted and windows came up with an error writing to folder message. Then a remote computer on my network was unable to read one of the shared folders since it seemed empty. So I checked this and every folder on my hard drive was still there but the contents gone. I reboot, hard drive was no longer seen by windows. Though the BIOS still sees the disk, and FDISK reckons the 15gig has only unpartitioned space.

Any suggestions on how to recover any data off it using any apps or other methods? I've tried Partition Magic but it couldn't undelete the partition. I have tried the HDD in another machine and that wouldn't read it either.

If you can help, then thanks!!

 

[jeremybarker]

I wouldn't power up that drive any more than you have to from here on out. Start searching for some third party recovery software that would suit your needs.

 

[MikewTexas]

I have the same problem I am missing 6 gigs on my hard drive and I can't fdisk the D: that is in NTFS. I have tried partition magic and system commander and neither one works. I can't even get my computer to regconize partition D: but when I am in MS DOS I can copy files to D: and look at files, but it won't allow me to format D:.

Thanks,

Mike

 

[fasttoon]

to DavidPaul,

try lost and found from powerquest, it was free for a while to owners of certain powerquest products, you can also try drive rescue, I don't know what the url is, use a search engine, they have a windows and a dos version, both are free.


to MikewTexas,

try the same software recovery program or since you can work with that partition in dos use a modified boot disk and xcopy/xxcopy/xcopy32 the data on your problem partition, then fdisk it again using non dos partition.

one thing both of you might try is to use the mbr switch because ntfs os rewrites the boot records, that might clear up the problem without doing anything, however not knowing what the problem is I would back up/transfer/save whatever I can before I do anything else.

Good Luck!!