This can't be happening to me!

[DarkCloud]

I don't know why this would happen, but all of a sudden my second hard drive is empty! I have two hard drives, one for storage and one for running an OS. My primary hard drive is running XP Pro and Win98 and of course my second drive is for storage. I don't understand it, my drive was fine earlier and now everything is completely gone. I tried restarting WIndows but that didn't help. I remember hearing that having two hard drives and running XP and 98 corrupts your files or soemthing, is that true? What can I do to get all my files back? I NEED THOSE FILES!

[MHz]

So long as you run the 2 OSes separate, no sharing programs etc, it is fine to do.

I could speculate, and say that perhaps the Master File Table has currupted. 3rd party defraggers can defrag the MFT, and are known for corrupting the MFT, hope you do not use any of these.

You should not write to this disk, in any way. You will need to use some HDD recovery software. I just googled, and found a free product. Not sure of it's expectation. Plenty of pay for types around.

Hope it works out for you.

[stanstan]

I have the second drive DEAD. No response at all. Drive not recognized in BIOS.

XP home SP2 etc

Need files on drive.

[MHz]

I have the second drive DEAD.  No response at all.  Drive not recognized in BIOS.

XP home SP2 etc

Need files on drive.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Normally, businesses are around, that can extract the info, from a dead drive. It may cost you, as you could imagine.

[DarkCloud]

So long as you run the 2 OSes separate, no sharing programs etc, it is fine to do.

I could speculate, and say that perhaps the Master File Table has currupted. 3rd party defraggers can defrag the MFT, and are known for corrupting the MFT, hope you do not use any of these.

You should not write to this disk, in any way. You will need to use some HDD recovery software. I just googled, and found a free product. Not sure of it's expectation. Plenty of pay for types around.

Hope it works out for you.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I had a feeling someone would say something like that. I know this all started right after I defragmented the drive, however I only used the defragmenter that is built into Windows and no other program. I even tried using a data recovery program and not the one you suggested yet, and some sectors were bad when it was being scanned. In this case, if I were to recover my files would I have to reformat the drive again?

[MHz]

If you have bad sectors, then reformat would be needed. As I have stated, no writing, before recovery. You could try a chkdsk without repair, and see what it brings up. Do it from dos, so you get the switches right for read only operation.

If you know anyone experienced with HDD recovery, I would certainly ask them, for help. System restore, maybe on for that drive as well, which could be a concern?

Good luck with any success.

[firefoxthebomb]

you could give getdataback a trey

[JoeMSFN]

I have the second drive DEAD.  No response at all.  Drive not recognized in BIOS.

XP home SP2 etc

Need files on drive.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I am assuming your not using a controller card and the HD is plugged into the motherboard. Also assuming the hard drive was recognized in the bios before, your pretty much outta (cheap and easy) luck. Perhaps you can find an IDENTICAL model HD and swap controller circuitry. Otherwise it's big bucks for someone like Ontrack to do similar.

At this point it's up to you to determine the value of your data, and thus worth paying to try.

[Francesco]

So long as you run the 2 OSes separate, no sharing programs etc, it is fine to do.

I could speculate, and say that perhaps the Master File Table has currupted. 3rd party defraggers can defrag the MFT, and are known for corrupting the MFT, hope you do not use any of these.

You should not write to this disk, in any way. You will need to use some HDD recovery software. I just googled, and found a free product. Not sure of it's expectation. Plenty of pay for types around.

Hope it works out for you.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I had a feeling someone would say something like that. I know this all started right after I defragmented the drive, however I only used the defragmenter that is built into Windows and no other program. I even tried using a data recovery program and not the one you suggested yet, and some sectors were bad when it was being scanned. In this case, if I were to recover my files would I have to reformat the drive again?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Don't touch that drive!!! there's an acronis utility to recover lost partition !!! It's called Acronis Recovery Expert: with it you can recover all the lost partitions in a drive in a matter of seconds.

I don't know if there are freeware tools that do the same job however if you can obtain a copy of that program it should solve your problem.

If you can't manage to recover the partition with some windows utilities you could even try to use linux fdisk program: if your partition was using all of your hard drive space and the problem was caused only by a partition table corruption you'll just have to create a new ntfs (or fat32 depending on which filesystem you were using before) on the hard disk with the same dimensions of the lost partition and it should work after.

And if using linux fdisk will not recover the partition you can try doing manual recovery with easyrecovery professional or other recovery utilities around (there are a few freeware ones that do the same things): easyrecovery and some of the recovering utilities around rebuild the previous filesystem informations and then recovers the file according to them.

[Garyth]

For a blank drive, I have seen chkdsk from a recovery console fix it

I've pretty much settled on using File Scavanger for all non-hardware based recoveries.

It's not free, but well worth the asking price. It will do a drive letter or defunct vlume search .. also supports defunct raid recoveries, which I've made use of successfully

-- make usre you have sufficient harddrive space on another drive to save your recovered data.

whatever option you choose to get your info back .. the previous warnings should be adhered to .. write nothing to the drive until you've exhausted all recovery efforts.

[^_^]

I've found getdataback at www.runtimes.org to work well as long as it's not a hardware problem

you can download and check the drive for free, even see your files IF it can recover them

in order to recover the data, you gotta pay

I had to get serial numbers for the NTFS and the FAT programs

but I recovered several GB worth of data for myself after accidental partition deletion during setup

also, I recoverd about 900MB of photos for a lady who accidentally deleted them thru nero (I can't believe the right pane of nero will allow deletion)