Help with my hard disk"My lifetime worth of data"

[bonoo]

Hi

*I had a 500Gb Western Digital hard wich is the 1ry hard.with an XP spack2 on it.

*I connected another sata hard disk 1000 Gb"1Tera"

which I just bought.

*I devided the 1000 gb to 4 partitions "300-300-200-150"

------>But I formatted it as "Dynamic disks"

After I "Moved" to the 1tera hard about 450 Gb of data.,It was fine untill I rebooted,,,,,

The windows can't boot if i have both hards on"500 and 1000"

but load fine without the 1tera hard.

Physically,the hard is perfect.

I connected the hard later to the "USB"

The windows recognizes the hard as

"1 Dynamic disk of 950Gb" and marked "offline"

Although I had 4 dynamic ntfs partitions.

I tried reactivation but it takes forever and I feel that nothing i going on.

Now to my Question:-

Can I convert my drives on the dynamic disk"4 partitions" To Basic?without losing the data?

And how can I get access to this dynamic disk again?I'm frightened of any activity that might reformat the disk.

Or there is a risk that my lifetime work of data will be lost if this process

Please help me I don't have any other copy of this data!

Thank you.

[jaclaz]

First, main thing:

DON'T PANIC

(assume the above to be written in large friendly letters)

Doing data recovery when not perfectly calm and relaxed is a shortcut to failure.

Get TESTDISK, here:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

READ carefully the docs and online tutorials on the site.

Get familiar with the app.

Then read here:

http://mypkb.wordpress.com/2007/03/28/how-...to-basic-disks/

Everything should go well.

jaclaz

[bonoo]

Hello jaclaz,

1st of all,

Thank you very much for your really nice reply.

I appreciate it.

Here is what happened:-

Like I told you I divided the 1000Gb hard into 4 partitions."300 ,300,200,and 150"

I used the instruction of testdisk u gave me.

I was ale to reactivate only the 1st partition,access it and see the data intact in it.

Then when I tried to reactivate the second partition--->This caused the space before this second volume to be read "unallocated" and the space after it became unallocated too.

plus none of the partitions on this hard became readable.

I was able to back up the data on the 1st partition,the only thing I want now is to get the data from the second partition,and then format the hard,the 3rd and 4th partitions are not important to me.

BTW The test disk runs very slowly although I have a "2.4 Quad processor 8mb cach,and 4Gb Ram"

I know I became such a burden but please bear with me,and Your advice is really appreciated.

And please if anybody else had any ideas,to help me with my situation,I'd be really grateful.

[jaclaz]

What you can try doing, depending on the type of data you need to recover, is to run PHOTOREC (companion app to TESTDISK).

While TESTDISK attempts (and usually succeeds ) to recover filesystems (partitions), PHOTOREC attempts to identify files bypassing actual filesystem, attempting to recognize them from RAW data.

It may be able to recover at least the "main" data.

jaclaz

[bonoo]

Thank you very much.jaclaz.

I owe you,

I got the vital data back.

Now, I will redivide the hard and format it.

Things are good again.

You are the best.

[jaclaz]

Happy you are once again among the happy bunnies :

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showto...128727&st=9

jaclaz