Edit: Solved - Hard disk help please

[Appledrop]

EDIT: THIS IS SOLVED - SEE MY LAST REPLY
hi, if anyone can help id be very grateful...

Earlier, I installed a game called Cabal Online, which includes a anti cheat program called GameGuard, which I think caused the problem - as apparantly it modifies drivers and other nasty things.
Anyway, i rebooted my machine after install, and then windows failed to load - it would reboot after the splash loading screen - same story with safe mode too.

So i booted off the XP install cd, and went to the recovery console -- processes involving the disk seemed not to work - Dir failed for example...

Soo, I attached it to this PC as a slave, hoping to recover my (important) data, and windows tells me that the hard disk is not formatted... I tried changing ide/power cables and no luck.

I am out of ideas.. Is all my data lost forever, or ?

 

[LouPoir]

Does not sound good at all.

Hard to believe that program would have done that damage.

I would download the diagnostic utility for that drive to confirm it is functioning OK. Use the West Digital utility in that it will work with any drive and it is Windows based.

Wish I could offer more help.

 

[Appledrop]

Originally posted by: LouPoir
Does not sound good at all.

Hard to believe that program would have done that damage.

I would download the diagnostic utility for that drive to confirm it is functioning OK. Use the West Digital utility in that it will work with any drive and it is Windows based.

Wish I could offer more help.

well, that WD "Data Lifeguard Tool" diagnostic said that the disk is FAT16, 33gb size, and non-bootable. It should be NTFS, 80gb....Argh. Cant believe this. Thanks loupoir, anyway

 

[John]

You should be able to use Data Recovery software.

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=27&threadid=1965117
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=33&threadid=1938376&enterthread=y

 

[drum]

spinrite has always worked for me.
I tis probably in one of john's links.

 

[Appledrop]

ok thanks all... All these recovery programs seem to only see about 30gig though, GetDataBack for example, shows "2nd hard drive 31.5GB" and then when you expand it "1st partition (NTFS) 76.3GB" ! Does anybody have an idea why this might be?

Couldnt quite work out that Spinrite program, i dont have a floppy drive so i assume it is useless ?

EDIT: I downloaded GetDataBack 2.31, and found an option to increase the sector size [so it realized all 80gb]] to search instead of what it chose originally, and this way i was able to recover all of my data!!