[schmoppa]

Hi,

I am running XP Professional.

I had 2 WD 120GB w/ 8MB cache drives, both nearly full, both FAT32.

I purchased a 200GB WD drive, and it came with a PCI card to allow for drives bigger than 133GB (or whatever).

I installed the card, and plugged in the 200GB drive as a slave and one of the 120GB drives as the master.

I installed the drivers for the card/drive, and then formatted the new drive as ntfs using Partition Magic boot disks.

I rebooted, and transferred all my files from one of the 120GB drives over to the 200GB drive. I then deleted the files from the 120GB drive, and again used partition magic to format in NTFS. But I had problems deleting sometimes, it would say that Explorer coudln't find this or that file to delete. So that's why I just reformatted the drive. I was able to access and use files from the new drive

Now I am told that this new 200GB drive has a problem.

I would try to open the drive, and it would tell me that it was corrupted (or something to that effect, I forget if the word "corrupted" was actually used). I restarted, and now the drive doesn't show up.

using Norton Disk Doctor, I am told that there is something wrong with the partitions (I didn't put any partitions, but there was a weird thing with this little 8MB (yes, MB) partition at the front of the drive that I didn't create. I think I found a way to get rid of it while using partition magic , but I can't remember what.

I went back to look at the partitions

NDD asks me if I want to fix the problem, that this will mean going through and searching for DOS partiitons. It also warned me to back up the drive first. But how can I back up without being able to see the drive? So, perhaps unwisely, I went ahead with this, and it is currently goign through every Head and cylinder. It's currently at the 7600th cylinder, and progressing slowly.

I would sure like to get my data back. any ideas?

 

[schmoppa]

What about programs such as iRecover or diskpatch? Are they helpful?

irecover is telling me I only have 131GB capacity on that drive, even though I did install the drivers that were SUPPOSED to make it recognize the entire amount.

It also tells me that "there are invalid volumes encountered, and they were discarded." The description says "Partition Tagble records for one or more volumes are damaged. Impact: This volume(s) are not shown in the list."

 

[schmoppa]

This is the partition info page in Partition Magic.