[lemmin]

I previously had two hard drives in my computer; a WD 80gb and a Maxtor DiamondMax plus 9, 250gb slave. prior to upgrading, they both worked fine.

I just put all new parts in my computer, including a new motherboard: MSI K8N Neo-F. I didn't touch the hard drives at all in the upgrading process, but the I cannot get the Maxtor to work.

The bios detects the Maxtor, but lists it with a funny name of random characters. The capacity listed was somewhere around 8,026kb. I figured the bios had so I flashed is with a new version. Now the name of the Maxtor in the bios is Laxtfr, or something to that apearence (two characters are wrong) and the capacity shows the same untill I press enter on auto detect; It then shows 111gb or a number just above 100.

At this point the Maxtor was not detected in windows at all, so i disabled it in the bios and that allowed it to be detected by windows computer management. I read somewhere to use the wizard to initialize the drive, but nothing happens when I do that (I havn't tried converting it because what I read said not to do it). The software that comes with the Maxtor allows me to "Set Up" the drive, but I get to a point where it says it is going to partition it and it scares me to continue because I have very important information on the drive that I can't afford to lose.

Any ideas?

the computer as it stands now consists of:

MSI K8N Neo-F motherboard
MSI 6600GT video card
Athlon 64 3000+ 939
WD 80gb HD
Maxtor 250gb HD

Windows XP Pro

[Nitestick]

check the cabling. when there are detection errors like this, especially with garbled model names it is normally a loose cable

[lemmin]

Yeah, it was loose, that's a little bit embarassing; however, it still will not work in windows. The maxtor software MaxBlast 3 still wants me to partition it, but I dont want to lose the information.

Computer management now shows "Online" for the drive after I initialized it, but still shows unallocated under it. It is not unallocated.

Anything I can do to ensure I don't lose information?

[Nitestick]

try a linux live-cd to see if the partition can still be accessed

[lemmin]

I have never done that before, can you explain what exactly it is I would need to do?

I am currently downloading Slax, does that one work for checking partitions?

[Nitestick]

it should do, i am not familiar with slax. post in the linux section and ask about mounting partitions. all you have to do is run the cd and see if you can mount the partition. if you can access the files we know your data isn't lost.

[lemmin]

I realize now that I don't have any cds available to burn the linux live to.

Upon further research, however, I was able to find a program called Partition Table Doctor 3. This program found partition table error and virtually corrected them, showing me the original parititions that I used to have on the hard drive. This program is a demo only though, so it will not write the new table to the drive.

I am fairly certain this is the fix I am looking for, do you know of any partition table repair tools that I can use one time for free?

[Nitestick]

i don't know if it will work on partitions that were not created with it but you could try BootItNG

[lemmin]

Thanks for all your help, nightstick, I have finally got it working.

Problem: Secondary Hardrive not recognized as having any partitions as it was previously in Windows.

Cause: I assume it was running the computer with the cord half-way plugged in, but there could have been other reasons.

Solution: Repair the partition table: either manually or by using a automated tool such as Partition Table Doctor 3.