Barthes

cluberti, You've got an happy end here! Using Testdisk (thanks, Ponch!) I managed to recover every file firstly, and then sucessufully reconstruct the MBR code. I really appreciated your assistance and guidance during my crisis: a BIG THANKS! Thanks also to you all in this thread.

Hi cluberti, Here they are: Old drive Partition Table: NTFS Boot Sector: Thanks for the help!

No - if drive recovery software sees the disk and your data, but XP says it's unallocated, you can almost be guaranteed that you simply have flipped bits in sector 1 causing it, which diskprobe can fix. It's just figuring out WHICH bits cluberti: No luck... As you can see, I've changed the 3rd byte in sector 01C0 to 07, but the system still reports an ivalid partition. And no, the magic 42 bit, the Answer to The Ultimate Question Of Life is not present... I'm posting the ORIGINAL faulty sector 1 here, just in case you can get any evidence from it: Also, TestDisk (recommended by Ponch) used to report a valid partition, doesn't do anymore. I'm going to revert my changes to the original status. I did a lot of googling looking for a way to figure this out, but I'm stucked. Any tip? Thanks a lot.

I’m beginning to get the whole picture: three days ago my PC was knocked down resulting in a fatal HD and memory crash. New memory, new drive, new OS installation, I would never expect getting a BSOD. But I just did. So, I’m beginning to think that the error with the old SATA is correlated with that incident and not with the OS installation. Maybe a faulty Mobo? cluberti: assuming my guess is accurate, can I still follow your suggestion? Ponch and jcarle: thanks for your tips. I’ve ran Testdisk (without modifying the HD ) but the results of the analysis were quite hopeful: Testdisk was capable to identify an OK struture of the whole partition, with the correct capacity and name. But I'm still taking my time to do a informed decision on this almost vital matter to me... thank you all for helping me.

Thank you for replying! I'm a little less worried now due to your answers. cluberti: The old SATA disk was formatted NTFS and was created basic. I guess you're right about the invalid bit/sector, but I'm very unfamiliar to sector edition to manage diskprobe... RyanVM: Thanks for your suggestions. I've gone trough reading both features, but somehow GetDataBack seemed more powerful. I'm going to download the demo version and see what it can do. I'll report my results. Any other tips are welcome. Thanks again!

Hi everybody! After a clean install on a new SATA drive, I found out that the other SATA disk, containing very important data, shows unallocated at XP Computer Management. It also does not appear as a local disk in My Computer. I'm more than terrified with the prospect of losing that data and would appreciate your help. My Specs: Asus P4Pe, XP Pro, 2 WD SATA 2 250 (w/jumper to SATA)