gnetcon

Everyone:

Here's some background. I have a computer with 2 drives (C & D) and a DVD Burner (E). Before my recent install, all worked fine.

I reinstalled XP on my C drive, but when it booted up to install, my drive letters were changes to H and I. "I" was my drive that was normally C, and H was my 200 GB secondary drive). So I started over, and C was again listed, but my secondary drive had no letter and showed free space of 197 GB. With the files I had on there, it should be about 100 GB.

Now the drive is not recognized by Windows at all. I moved it to another machine to try and repair it.

I'm thinking the MBR got hosed up? Or did Windows totally destroy it? Before I go and try to fdisk it or reformat, I'd like to see if I can get the files off of it. I had all of my backup data on it.

I have tried to run Partition Magic and Partition Doctor on it, but before I go any farther, I'd like some more opinions.

TIA!

baker421

On your desktop, right-click My Computer and choose Manage.

Double-click Disk Management.

Maximize the page.

In the menu bar at the top, choose the Action tab and then click Rescan.

Now, in the lower-right pane, you'll see the hard disks and the cd/dvd drives that the computer sees. One HDD will be marked "system." That's your windows drive.

Right-click on that drive, choose "change drive letter..." and change it to C.

Now if you see the other hard disk, change it to what you want.

Remember, you can't change to the same drive letter that a cd/dvd drive already has, so you may need to change those first in the same manner before you can assign the new letters to the HDDs.

Did that help?

JB

gnetcon

Thanks for the advice.

I did what you mentioned. I see 3 drives in the PC I moved the disk to. I have C, D, and the corrupted disk. All say "Healthy", but the only option I have for the bad disk is "Delete Partition". It also says capacity 186.31 GB and Free Space of 186.31 GB.

When I do Action > Rescan Disks, a quick message says "Disk rescan in progress, please wait..." and then disappears.

Thanks again.

Lydokane

Baker,

It appears that gnetcon's C drive has been restored. Also, if memory serves, you can not change a drive letter designation of the system drive if you are actually using it (I might be wrong though).

Gnetcon,

I had this problem once myself. I'm fairly certain that your MBR is damaged/corrupt. When this happened to me I had to use a recovery software to recover the data. I don't remember which software I used. Just google 'recovery software'.

I also had to have a separate backup drive to recover the data to. When you recover the data you can't recover it to the save drive because you will be overwriting the data that you are trying to recover. If you have enough space on your C drive you can recover the data from the damaged D drive to the C. If you don't have enough space on the C you will need to beg, buy, borrow or steal another drive with enough space.

After you rescue the data from the damaged D drive you can use Windows Disk Management to create a new partition then format the D drive then you will be able to transfer the data back to the D drive.

Someone here might know of ways to repair the MBR but I searched hi & low and couldn't find any info on repairing it when it happened to me. Also, if you have already partitioned the D drive, you don't want to format it. You will have a much more difficult time rescuing the data. If you have already formatted, you really, really, don't want to write anything because it becomes much, much more difficult to cheaply rescue the data. It isn't impossible but very costly.

One other thing, the hard lesson that I learned is remove all unnecessary drives prior to reinstalling an OS. When I reinstall I don't usually replace those drives until everything is completely setup and I have a good idea where all my drive letter designations are going to be.

Lydokane

gnetcon

Hard lesson indeed. I have done this a lot of times, so I didn't think twice. Next time I will do it just to be safe.

I've tried a few programs. But I'll google what you mentioned and see if that helps.

Thanks!

baker421

OK, well that's what rescan does. So now we think that you've maybe lost your data altogether; lost the NTFS directory?

Maybe not, but that's all I can think of. At this point all I would know to do is to run a data recovery program. You have to put that drive in a working computer as a slave to do that.

I use GetDataBack but it's a bit spendy. Maybe someone here knows of a freeware proggy that will recover the data.

That is of course if I'm right that you "lost" your data.

You might disconnect the other HDD and boot to the xp install disk. Go into "repair" (not repair using the repair console - go past that) and you'll get a dos type of window. Type in chkdsk and see what you get.

I can't remember if chkdsk /r works there or not. (r for repair.) I'm too used to other utilities.

Please wait for some more posts?

JB

baker421

Sorry Lydokane, I didn't see your post. Must have posted as I was typing. :)

I think you can go into Repair on the install CD boot as I mentioned before, and type fixmbr at the prompt. There's also a fixboot command that fixes the boot files.

However, doesn't it look as if all of the data, not just the mbr and/or boot files are missing?

JB

baker421

Now that you mention it, I'm sure you're right. This goes to what you said about disconnecting all other drives. That way you also get C out of the deal.

Thanks for the reminder,

JB

gnetcon

I'm currently running a recovery program on it now. I'll see what happens.

Thanks to all for the advice. It is greatly appreciated.

gnetcon

I went ahead and bit the bullet and got GetDataBack. It is now copying the old files off of the drive to another drive. It looks like I'm going to get my data back.

Thanks again.