SpaceCowboyX

Hello everyone,

Thanks for your help on this forum. My 4 day ordeal with fixing this broken disk drive has been resolved. I got the tip from another post to get active partition recovery enterprise. That did the trick.

Maybe my process can help someone else with a similar problem so I'll recap.

I realized my partitions disappeared from 'My computer' (i'm running vista, btw)

I powered down and check my bios to see if it was still recognizing the disk in question. It was, so I knew the disk hadn't completely crapped out. It was also recognized in Disk Management, so that led me to believe that the MBR and/or Partition Table were not working. (Still don't know the reason for why it was corrupted to begin with.) This was the correct assumption apparently.

After searching for a while I came across TestDisk. This is a free shareware program that scans the disk, then recreates the MBR based on the data in the hard disk. The problem with this for me, was that it was not recognizing any of my 3 disks, only my CD drive. I gave up on this program, but I've heard from different sources that it does work. You might give that a shot first, since it's free.

Then I saw a post with someone with a similar problem, and they used Active Partition Recovery Enterprise. I did the "super scan" on the broken HD and it found my two old partitions. (the ones i wanted to recover) as well as some old partitions from previous formats.

From the super scan results, I right clicked those two data chunks and selected their old partition letters. It gives you a warning about the disk being initialized in Windows... What I think this means is that if your disk is from another version of windows and you move it to a different computer with a different version of windows, you might have to initialize it so that Windows will recognize it. (I'm honestly not clear on what it means) Anyway... Viola, the immediately came back in "My Computer" without even a reset.

Hopefully this will help someone else with bad partition tables. The reason it took me so long, was that I was very timid in taking any steps in the process until I did my research on the programs, because I didn't want to do irreparable damage to the already damaged disk. Luckily it worked out well. You should still read other posts by people on these forums who are much more competent than I... but I thought I'd do a little endorsement for Active Partition Recovery Enterprise, since it worked for me.

Good luck