intmmsp

Yesterday, I wanted to re-install XP, and the media I used was an old version which is not bundled with any service pack. After the installation was launched, I found that it could not recognize my SATA hard drive, and there was only an strange partition with unknown format on the SATA drive.

I have another IDE drive and so I tried to install the OS into the first partition of the IDE drive. But before I could proceed, I was asked to format the C: drive on the SATA drive. Then, I reboot my computer using my Super Grub disk, and I found that I could not verify the disk geometry of my sata drive.

I remove the SATA drive from the system, and installed windows server 2003on the IDE, which is the one I am using right now. In addition, I hooked the SATA drive back up and now I can only see a icon in my computer but as soon as i click on it, the OS reminds me of formatting that partition.

I tried testdisk... on the page of quick search, the current partition structure of the SATA drive was detected as invalid FAT16 boot sector. I also did quick search, but i was told that the partitions were not able to be recovered.

In the disk management of windows server 2003, the SATA drive is healthy and the capacity is only 128GB, which is supposed to be 320GB with 4 partitions.

What should I do next? Could someone please give me some suggestion, I really appreciate it.

manic

Im kinda confused on your questions, and the order in which there
mentioned, but I'll give it a shot. For one there is a size limitation
for the drive with sp1, install sp2, then go to disk management and
allocate the left over space.
If I were going to install the os on the sata drive I would totally
disconnect the ide drive. Then reconnect it after the os installation.
When using a sata drive as the C: drive you may need to go into
bios and make sure raid is disabled, and that the bios is treating the
sata drive as a ide. Your board may require a sata driver, this will
have to be installed via floppy when installing the os, via the f3 key
prompt, Im pretty sure its the f3 key...Hope this helps.

Deleted090308

Hi,

What file system was used on the SATA drive before you formatted it?
How was it partioned - any hidden system partitions?

intmmsp

Hi,

There were four partitions on it,
1) NTFS (primary partition), I have windows vista installed on it
2) FAT32, for data storage
3) NTFS, for data storage
4) ext2, for linux (it was further partitioned under linux environment)

I used Paragon Partition manager. And the latest modification on the partition before it was corrupted was
1) shrinking the ext2 from 100GB to 50GB (resulting in 50GB free space),
2) deleting an 80GB FAT32 partition, and creating a 130GB (80+50) NTFS one, i.e. the 3) mentioned above.

I am not sure if it is true that only the partition table has been corrupted. Thank you very much.

intmmsp

---------------------------------------------------
I had a partition for installing windows, but the installer of XP without SP could not recognize it. In addition, I could not proceed because I had to change the partition to continue the installation, and if I changed it, I might lose data on other partition.

I have the setup the BIOS such that it can consider the sata drive as an IDE. I used windows XP+SP2 before, and there was no problem with the disk recognition. I think what you mentioned is the F6 installation, which is used to install the Intel Matrix Storage Manager Driver.
-------------------------------------------------------------

Thank you very much

Deleted090308

When installing XP it must have written a new MBR/partition table.
XP without service packs will only recognize 128GB of the HDDs capacity.

I think you should use GetDataBack to recover important data before we try to fix the partitions with TestDisk.