xpcraze

I am happy man now (almost)! Managed to retrieve most of my data.Firstly I played with Partition Magic 8 (dos bootable), Testdisk, Partition Table Doctor and messed up things a bit, I thought I lost all the data.Then I tried a few utilities including On Track's Easy Disk Recovery and "revived" the drive, at least I could see that most of the data was still there.I then booted newly installed XP and installed Partition Magic 8.5 and moved/merged partitions about, then simply used it's integrated browser to copy / paste data to C drive. Copy/paste operation is lightening fast under Partition Magic's file browser! Now I am burning it all to DVD's. I am still missing some data and I believe it resides on one partition which Partition Magic sees as Linux file system and I am unable to do anything with it at the moment, will give another try On Track Easy Disk Recovery (very impressed with the speed of this program) once I burned all these DVD's LOL Thanks for all the info again guys!

Thanks to all for the links and info, I will have to do some reading now... already tried a couple of tools from tommyp's link above, even though I already enabled big LBA manually through the registry. Did the 48big LBA patch from above link again and it passed! Rebooted the system and the drive is still seen as 128GB partition + 58.31GB unpartitioned space, so the drive is recognized as 200GB, but no sign of my old 3 NTFS partitions. The drive was unplugged while I was installing SP1+2, however I plugged it in after reinstalling XP Pro core. The only thing I did to the drive, I made the 128GB active (in XP management console), which I now believe is wrong and not quite sure if this would have altered old partitions info and data. I will see if I can get Partion Magic and boot the system with the second drive only, then examin it. Since the drive is seen in the Bios fine, do you think I could modify boot.ini file and change the line for the second disk to reflect real partition sizes? Will let you know if I get any resuts

thanks bush-911, anyone with a bit more creativity please?

Hi all, My Internet Explorer was crashing and bringing the system unstable so I decided to delete entire OS (Windows XP Pro SP2) and reinstall it from scratch. Main board is Asus NCCH-DL with dual Xeon 2.8GHz CPU's, Crucial 1GB DDR400 RAM. Prior to rebuild I had 2 x Seagate SATA drives (ST3200822AS) split in 4 and 3 NTFS partitions each and running individualy (ie no RAID enabled). Prior to rebuilding XP, I disconnected my second SATA drive which I use for storing of large video footages and family photos and my music. I was not aware of XP's 128 / 137GB limit and I rebuilt the OS (with no SP1/2 as yet) then replugged this drive as a second drive the same way as it was running before. XP could see the second drive as 128GB only!!! Since then I did all MS auto updates and installed SP1 and SP2 and the OS can now see the whole drive (in the drive manager under admin tools), however it says it's not formatted and it sees it as 1 partition of 128GB and 58.31GB unpartitioned space. Obviously I have data on this drive (I hope it's still there) and would not want to reformat it, do you possibly know if there is any way that I can see the original 3 NTFS partitions and retrieve my data from this drive please? Any help on this would be greatly appreciated! Desperate for help