Hard drive got wiped on XP reinstall???

[dimtim]

Hey I just reinstalled XP cause I had a bunch of viruses and spyware. On the reinstall, not my boot drive, but my other hard drive got completely wiped. I had most of it backed up, so I'm not too concerned, but is there anyway to get it back? The weird part is that when I right click the 250 gb hard drive it says that 104 gb of it is being used, but I can't see any files.

Any advice on this?

Thanks
Tim

[redwudz]

A reinstall of Windows shouldn't touch anything but the boot drive. Are you sure it's been wiped? Not just unavailable? But you may be able to recover it with a disk recovery program. But don't write anything to it until you try that, or all may be lost.

If you have similar boot and secondary drives and you want to do a reinstall, it's a good idea to unplug the secondary drive as Windows may not be able to tell one drive from another.

I always repartition and reformat my boot drive for a reinstall of the OS. That gives me a 'clean slate' to work with. Difficult to recover, though, if you had data on it you might need. I always stick to the (my) 'golden rule', Don't put anything on a hard drive that you can't afford to lose. Anytime you do a major overhaul of the OS, you want backups.

[SLK001]

Have you check your recycle bin?

[wulf109]

Do you have two physical HD's or one with partitions?

[dimtim]

Yeah I have 3 hard drives right now. SATA boot drive, and 2 IDE large storage drives. The crash was in one of my large storage drives. It wasn't a huge deal, but it was kind of annoying. The funny thing was I was reorganizing stuff so I could back more of it up, and reinstalling XP was part of the process, haha.

Thanks for the advice
Tim

[OzzyDownunder]

Yep, Had the same thing happen to me with SATA master drive and IDE slave re-install wiped all files on SLAVE. Told by a Techo when re-installing disconect your SLAVES otherwise you might have a FRESH install on your slave or a reformatted Slave. Looks like SATA Have problems at this stage with working with IDE Drives.

[Dv8ted2]

Yep, Had the same thing happen to me with SATA master drive and IDE slave re-install wiped all files on SLAVE. Told by a Techo when re-installing disconect your SLAVES otherwise you might have a FRESH install on your slave or a reformatted Slave. Looks like SATA Have problems at this stage with working with IDE Drives.

That was what I was going to recommend. I have also seen an instance where if you didn't disconnect the slaves, the boot record was on the wrong drive.

[ofbarea]

This is interesting...

There are several releases of XP. With some you need a previously installed OS on the disk, with some others you need a clean disk to install and there are some others that will allow you do do pretty much whatever you like.

Branded XP disks (IE: DELL) used to delete everything before they install.

[ntscuser]

Hey I just reinstalled XP cause I had a bunch of viruses and spyware. On the reinstall, not my boot drive, but my other hard drive got completely wiped.

Been there, done that, bought the teeshirt

Since then have always physically disconnected my data drive before reformattting or cloning the system drive.

I had most of it backed up, so I'm not too concerned, but is there anyway to get it back? The weird part is that when I right click the 250 gb hard drive it says that 104 gb of it is being used, but I can't see any files.

Try TesDisc 6.7. If that doesn't work, nothing will.

[Krispy Kritter]

I seem to remember reading awhile back that this was a feature/bug of the XP install package.

[wulf109]

Just dis-connect your D-E-etc HD's when you install re-install XP on your C drive. Re-connect after you update. I've installed XP many times on multiple HD systems and never had this problem.

[jollyjohn]

Quote
but is there anyway to get it back?
<<<<<<<<???????>>>>>>>>>>

O&O DiskRecovery will recover data from a formated HD. Just select the right option and do not write anything to that drive.

[MeDiCo_BrUjO]

You have to install Service Pack 2 in order to XP to recognize a drive of such magnitude.
Once you install SP2 all will be normal again.

[MeDiCo_BrUjO]

The data is still in the disk but XP is not recognizing it.
I hope that you didn't mess with it yet.

Install SP2 and the drive will be "availiable" again.

Let me know how that worked!

[SLK001]

What MeDiCo_BrUjO said sounds correct.

Did you install from an original XP disk (with no service packs slipstreamed)? If so, then you need to enable 48-bit addressing. I know that it is native to SP2, but is NOT available in the original version - don't know about SP1.

Once you have messed with a drive with 48-bit addressing with a non 48-bit addressing OS, you may have lost everything above 137GB on your HD. Your best bet would be to create a slipstreamed XP with SP2 and reinstall XP.