Corrupted Hdd

[tigerbeer]

Hi everyone,

I have an 80Gig drive which was in my older PC and I can remember it having 3 partitions. C,D and E. Thought I could use it in my newer PC and so I got it hooked up. After starting windows XP and going to My Computer, I only find one drive which is E. Well my new HDD has two partitions namely C and D. so obviously this new drive would start with E. Thing is that the older HDD is 80Gigs but it only shows it as one drive with a space of 31Gigs and shows it as unformatted. So i formatted it. What happened to the rest of the space?

I had alot of music in there and its really not very important that those files be recovered. It would be good if I could recover those files but how can i get back the rest of my 50Gigs of HDD space? Is there some sort of freeware out there to let me do this? Would be wonderful if I could have full 80Gigs of space from that older HDD>

any ideas ???

thanks,

TB..

[bino]

Spinrite - simply amazing software for sorting out corrupted disks. I've been able to recover every single instance of corruption using it and can't speak highly enough!!! (Easy to find if you search for Spinrite)

It is pay software- slightly less than $100 ($89 IIRC), but worth every penny if you have lost valuable or important data.

[JetsetBkk]

These tools helped me recover 200 GB of data that disappeared with a partition: Partition Find And Mount and TestDisk

This forum is excellent for hard drive problem support (not that the gurus at TV aren't): "Have You Lost A Hard Drive or Partition".

[A_Traveller]

Partition failure is ironically easier to deal with, since the structure was designed with recovery in mind, unfortunately not the same can be said for NTFS. I see Jet has beaten me to recommendations so I'll just concur. On Spinrite and similar tools {HDD Regenerator} they really need updating to provide more effective {time to run} support for large drive sizes. By the by HDD does offer a free version which fixes the first error it finds, and can then be upgraded.

Regards

[Rice_King]

After starting windows XP and going to My Computer, I only find one drive which is E. Well my new HDD has two partitions namely C and D. so obviously this new drive would start with E. Thing is that the older HDD is 80Gigs but it only shows it as one drive with a space of 31Gigs and shows it as unformatted. So i formatted it. What happened to the rest of the space?

Is it possible that your new computer is formatted using the FAT32 file system? If so, and your old drive was formatted with NTFS, then those NTFS partitions would not appear in the "My Computer" view. FAT32 cannot access NTFS partitions.

[tigerbeer]

After starting windows XP and going to My Computer, I only find one drive which is E. Well my new HDD has two partitions namely C and D. so obviously this new drive would start with E. Thing is that the older HDD is 80Gigs but it only shows it as one drive with a space of 31Gigs and shows it as unformatted. So i formatted it. What happened to the rest of the space?

Is it possible that your new computer is formatted using the FAT32 file system? If so, and your old drive was formatted with NTFS, then those NTFS partitions would not appear in the "My Computer" view. FAT32 cannot access NTFS partitions.

guys i think i screwed it up to start off with. the jumper settings maximised all partitions combined to 32Gigs. Hence the E drive with 32Gigs. And then formatting it screwed it all up one more time. so i am not sure if that 32 gigs of formatting would have taken space from all three partitions on the HDD.

I have downloaded Partition Find and Mount. It has found all three partitions . thanks everyone

RiceKing, My new computer had two partitions on its HDD. C is NTFS and D is FAT32. weird. Anyways what i have done is bought an external cheap enclosure for 320baht. so its working fine now and no more hassle with jumper and BIOS settings. This is via USB.

thanks again everyone.

TB..

[A_Traveller]

Sometimes the second partition on a new computer is the recovery area {contains the default OS implementation} is nearly always set to FA32.

Regards

[tigerbeer]

Ok i found two partitions with Partition Find and Mount. So all three partitions are still there on the HDD. However only the first one is visible and the other two need to be mounted to read. How do I make it a normal readable and writable partition? I tried Acronis Disk Director Suite and its a useless program. Can't even find any partitions. Maybe because its on USB ? I mean the old HDD.

[JetsetBkk]

Ok i found two partitions with Partition Find and Mount. So all three partitions are still there on the HDD. However only the first one is visible and the other two need to be mounted to read. How do I make it a normal readable and writable partition? I tried Acronis Disk Director Suite and its a useless program. Can't even find any partitions. Maybe because its on USB ? I mean the old HDD.

Glad you got "Partition Find And Mount" to work. When I used it, I simply copied all the files on the newly mounted partition to another drive on another hard disk. I could only mount the faulty partition using "FindAndMount", never using Windows.

I also couldn't delete the partition using Windows. So it wasn't possible to re-format the drive. That's where "TestDisk" helped. I used "TestDisk" to delete all data in the partition table by writing zeroes to it. That is clearly not something you want to do if there is any data (that you want to keep) on any partition of the disk. But in my case, I'd already copied everything I wanted onto another disk, so I was in a "no lose" situation - the disk was almost useless to me anyway so zeroing the partition table couldn't do any more damage (providing it was the correct hard disk! )

So after zeroing the partition table, the "undeletable" partition joined the rest of the "Unallocated" space on the disk - as shown by Windows Disk Manager - and I could start again making new partitions and formatting them.

You could do worse than post your problem on that forum and asking for help. They know about TestDisk and FindAndMount.

Best of luck!

Edited June 25, 2008 by JetsetBkk

[tigerbeer]

JetSetBkk,

ok its all done. I don't know what i was exactly doing in TestDisk but its all worked out fine. I then used Acronis Disk Director to partition all into one and re-format into NTFS. So its all worked out fine. thanks everyone..

TB>>

[JetsetBkk]

JetSetBkk,

ok its all done. I don't know what i was exactly doing in TestDisk but its all worked out fine. I then used Acronis Disk Director to partition all into one and re-format into NTFS. So its all worked out fine. thanks everyone..

TB>>

Excellent! Well done