NTFS system not recognized, XP says disc is 100% free !! I'm in TROUBLE !

[Zetti]

Hi all,

I think I'm is serious trouble... I have a HD full of data only, it was instaled as slave on the old computer.

But now I bought a new MOBO, P5WD2 Premium, and built a completely new computer, from scratch.

I have one empty HD instaled at the PRI_EIDE red connector, and hooked up the HD mentioned above, full of data, at the other red connector, SEC_EIDE.

I succesfully instaled Windows XP Pro SP2 at the desired HD, Windows recognizes my drive but says it's empty, it doesn't recognize the file system, it says it's free, and keeps asking me to format it, I might be a dumb but not that much :P , so I haven't formated it at all, I'm pretty sure my data is there but how can I access it now ?

I tried to fix the problem but I'm afraid I've done things even worse, I changed the HD to "dynamic" disc and created a new volume on it........useless...

I instaled the disc as slave at another computer, this one I'm typing now, same problem, disc is listed as dynamic and 100% free, no file system recognized....

Any help please ?

Thank you very much,

Zetti

[jameshgross]

You could try a program like WINHEX to see what is really on the disk.
There are several disk recovery programs available. Search google.
I dont hold out much hope.

[aedipuss]

about the only thing you can try at this point to get back any of the data is a data recovery program. to start with the drive will have to be put back into the computer in which you converted the drive to "dynamic", as all volume info about that drive is now stored on the boot drive of that computer. nothing else will be able to read anything on it. then try something like the program "active undelete" or "recover my files"
http://www.download.com/File-Disk-Management/3150-2248_4-0.html?tag=dir
if they can't find anything it's all gone.

p.s. you really don't want dynamic drives on a home computer. as another headsup, next time don't have the second hard drive plugged in at the time you install windows. plug it in after installation is complete. occasionally windows will muck up and do strange things to the second drive.

[Lucifers_Ghost]

occasionally windows will muck up and do strange things to the second drive.

Windows muck things up? Noooooooooooo. How dare you say such a thing? :P

[Soopafresh]

Don't give up just yet. As long as she isn't clicking, you'll very likely get the data back.

[ki.cheuk]

I had the same problem with my second drive doing the same thing in the same computer every few months or so. I use Hiren's Boot CD to recovery the drive. Take about an hour but it works. Put cd in drive and boot to cd. Use HDD Ultilities and pick the type of drive like MAXTOR and do full scan. Once scan finished follow instructions carefully type YES then ENTER and YES then ENTER (AGAIN !!) That's how I fixed mine !!!! Good-Luck !!! ki

[Zetti]

Hi all,

Thanks very much to all that replied, I got a program entitled "getdataback" and it seems to be working so far,

I plugged the HD as slave at another computer and have been trasnefring my data to a USB drive,

Thanks again !

Zetti