Hi - I'd really appreciate any help that I can get with my question.
About two years ago I added a second hard drive to my computer (a PIII 450, OS440BX motherboard). I had a few problems, since my mboard was old it wouldn't recognice the full 60GB of my hard drive, but after updating the BIOS and running a program called Disk Manager 2000, everything was fine.
I eventually filled it up about half-way with various games, photos, mp3s, etc. when all of a sudden it stopped being recognized by my PC. I eventually ended up reformatting the drive, and it seemed to work as before. Running various recovery programs, I even managed to see most of my old files there, but they were pretty useless (pictures only showed part of the photo, mp3s would only play for a few seconds, etc.) and I ended up rebuilding my collection of files over the past year.
Last night, once again halfway full, I downloaded a movie trailer and was saving a pic from the Web when the file download window, instead of showing the other pics of the same type, showed a bunch of folder icons with gibberish as their names. Scrolling across I could find most of my old photos, but they again only displayed a portion of the picture, the rest being a solid color.
After restarting the computer, I again could not access the D: drive. Scandisk won't work on it, and a diagnostic program I downloaded from Maxtor (the IDE version, it's not a SCSI drive) shows no problems.
Is there any way I can use the drive again? If I have to reformat, is there a more effective way I can try to recover most of what I lost? Would it make any sense to remove the drive and try attaching it to someone else's newer computer to try to get at my files? Am I completely screwed? I'd appreciate any help or advice!
Thanks,
Ed
