[SkyHawk]

New guy here and I had a 40GB Maxtor HDD (my C: drive) take a major dump on me. I had a WD 20GB HDD laying around so I installed Windows XP (system has dual HDD with XP installed initially) in an attempt to maybe move the files I had on the Maxtor to this WD until I can get it replaced.

Anyway, after I got the WD HDD formated, XP installed and booted the system up I went to look at the WD 250GB HDD that was the second drive of the system and Windows tells me now that the 250GB HDD is NOT formatted.

I don't know if initially formatting the WD 20GB HDD without having the second WD 250B HDD connected to the system has anything to do with his problem, but does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can get XP to see that the second WD HDD IS properly formatted?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
SkyHawk

[jeremy]

the file system is currupted , few things you can do

1) use data recovery software i recommend these: easy recovery pro/file scavenger/r-studio/getdataback/finalrecovery , of course non of em is free..

2) cant say for sure it will work as i never had expirence with it in such a data loss situation , ive heard linux can read currupted file systems better , use kanotix or knoppix (linux live cds)
http://kanotix.com/index.php?&newlang=eng
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html
and burn the data to cd/dvd or copy it to your other hd (linux have pretty crappy ntfs write support,so if your wd 20gb isnt set as fat32 forget about that idea or use acronis disk director suite 10/partition magic to convert it to fat32 without data loss)

3) take your chances with chkdsk (might make the situation even worse,but might also restore the partition to a readable state)
goto start-->run-->cmd and put this and press enter
chkdsk /F /R X:\ (replace X with the partition drive letter)

if your gonna do #1 or #2 , after done just format that partition so it will be usable again , and no matter which one of em your gonna do after its all done better use powermax (maxtors diagnostic software) to get it checked

also i wonder , did you overclock before it happened? some mobos currupt the hd when the overclock is too high for em to handle

[SkyHawk]

File System Corrupted - On the WD 250GB HDD that was used as the "D:/" drive before the Maxtor took the dump?

Both the Maxtor 40GB and the WD 250GB drives were/are formatted for NTFS.

CPU has NOT be overclocked (I ain't that smart).

Thanks,
SkyHawk

[jeremy]

well considering you were sayin the problem is with the 250gb thats defintly what i meant , and now that i think about it you havnt said what exactly happend to the maxtor

[SkyHawk]

First off, let me clearify. My system had/has 2 HDD's. The master drive was the Maxtor 40GB. The WD 250GB is the slave.

The Maxtor would not boot. After running scandisk yesterday, seems that there are all kinds of bad sectors, bad files, ect. on it. So I guess I am going to have to replace it. And as far as I know the WD 250GB HDD was working fine before so I am assuming that there is nothing wrong with it.

What I did was replace the Master HDD with an older WD 20GB to make sure that the problem was with the HDD and the MB. I installed XP with only the WD 20GB to see if I could get the system to boot up. It does so I don't think there is anything wrong with the MB.

Now, after I reconnected the slave WD 250GBHDD and tried to open it up to check that all of my (data) files were still there, XP indicates that the slave drive is no longer formatted - even though it was working fine before the Master drive went south.

So what I am trying to find out is why XP thinks the Slave is not formatted and what I can do to correct it without losing all my data on that drive - especially since I do not have any backups.

Thanks,
SkyHawk

[Stevo808]

Try looking up for some free back up utilities. There should be some out there and if not theres trial versions that you could use. You could also take your 250GB HD to another computer and hook it from there to see the results.

[jeremy]

connect the 250gb standalone on the secondary ide channel (without a 2nd device on the cable) might be some sort of conflict and remember depending on the jumper position this is how the cable should be connected mobo-->slave device-->master device , also its weird that first you had issues with your maxtor and then this one, the mobo ide controller might be faulty, if reconnecting it standalone as suggested above^ wouldnt help then try another ide cable if both didnt work then i suggest youll connect it to another pc if you got one or to a friends pc and see how it goes and if it will still be same on the other pc then i guess you really got bad luck in that case youll have to do one of the things i suggested in my first reply