Hard Drive - cant access data

94transam

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Jan 17, 2003
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Ok, heres the deal. PC took a dump the other day. I screwed it up more trying to get it back up. I two hard drives i need data from. One is a WD IDE 120gb. When I plug it into any PC that has an os, it shows up under admin tools, but not My Computer with the name still (Media), no drive letter, no options under the rclick menu except for 'make drive dynamic. I cant explore or open it. And it says active. I should try to take a screen shot. anyways.
The other drive is a Maxtor 300gb SATA. This one is weird. Because its 300gb, it was my OS, and it was in RAID 0. When i was trying to 'fix' my pc, i changed to bios to non-raid and let the windows disk just find it. Its an original windows disk, not sp2. Therefore it only say 120gb of it. Somehow, it made a new partion. So now i have a drive with 2 partitions. One 120, one 130 something and two little chunks of non-partitioned space. 15mb and like 5mb. I cant access either partition. It says, drive not formatted when i try explore on either one. And these two partitions do show up in My Computer as D: and E:. As i said, this whole drive was originally one partition, ran in raid 0.
I need the data from these. Especially my 100gb of music from the WD. But the other is all my personal crap for a loooong while back.
 

94transam

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Jan 17, 2003
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Well, let me see if i can explain this clearly.
The mobo has two choices for SATA. Raid, or non-raid. In non-raid, the mobo sneses it as a SATA drive and when you run the XP install disk, it just appears in the list, but only with 130gb.
The other option is Raid.
When you use this, after the IDE HD list at post, another screen comes up showing the drive as RAID, then when you run the XP install, you have to hit F5 for a third party driver, insert a floppy with the SATA/RAID driver for the mobo, and then it shows up. But this time, it shows up as 300gb.
Thats how i installed xp originally.
When it crashed. In my 'fixings' i changed the setting to non-raid and tried to do a repair. Somehow i let windows start an install on the drive, now only showing as 130gb. I canceled it and tired other stuff.
That is why i think it shows as two partitions now.
 

Fullmetal Chocobo

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May 13, 2003
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Originally posted by: 94transam
Well, let me see if i can explain this clearly.
The mobo has two choices for SATA. Raid, or non-raid. In non-raid, the mobo sneses it as a SATA drive and when you run the XP install disk, it just appears in the list, but only with 130gb.
The other option is Raid.
When you use this, after the IDE HD list at post, another screen comes up showing the drive as RAID, then when you run the XP install, you have to hit F5 for a third party driver, insert a floppy with the SATA/RAID driver for the mobo, and then it shows up. But this time, it shows up as 300gb.
Thats how i installed xp originally.
When it crashed. In my 'fixings' i changed the setting to non-raid and tried to do a repair. Somehow i let windows start an install on the drive, now only showing as 130gb. I canceled it and tired other stuff.
That is why i think it shows as two partitions now.

Okay, now let me try.

Your 300gb drive shows up as a 130gb drive becase 48-bit LBA was not enabled. Without 48-bit LBA enabled, your operating system can only allocate a hard drive of 137gb. After you install Windows XP (with SP2), it enables 48-bit LBA and it's able to see the full 300gb disk. Thus, it allocated the first 130 gb of the 300 gb hard drive as D:, and then the remainder as E:. Follow?

RAID 0 is striping 1 or more drives. What was the drive striped with? Was it done with itself (intel Matrix RAID style), or with another drive?
 

94transam

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Jan 17, 2003
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I totally understand what your saying. But initially I used the RAID. I dont know know alot about raid. I dont really know if it was 0. It was the only drive, and all i did was change the bios to RAID, instead of non-raid. I didnt do anything else except install XP. At that time the whole 300 showed up during install. Non sp2. Its only when i choose, non-raid that it doesnt during install.

Just so you know.
The point im at now, is fully installed XP SP2 on an IDE drive (neither of these)
The other drives are plugged in.
The SATA in bios is set to non-raid and no raid controller initializes.

I am most concerned about getting the data off of those two drives with windows running good on another drive. After I get the data off, i will do a full format on them.
 

Fullmetal Chocobo

Moderator<br>Distributed Computing
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May 13, 2003
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Originally posted by: 94transam
I totally understand what your saying. But initially I used the RAID. I dont know know alot about raid. I dont really know if it was 0. It was the only drive, and all i did was change the bios to RAID, instead of non-raid. I didnt do anything else except install XP. At that time the whole 300 showed up during install. Non sp2. Its only when i choose, non-raid that it doesnt during install.

Just so you know.
The point im at now, is fully installed XP SP2 on an IDE drive (neither of these)
The other drives are plugged in.
The SATA in bios is set to non-raid and no raid controller initializes.

I am most concerned about getting the data off of those two drives with windows running good on another drive. After I get the data off, i will do a full format on them.

What drive do you have your OS on now, or is it on a seperate computer entirely? If I were in that situation, I'd leave the affected drives alone to preserve their state as much as possible, and start looking into getting some software for data recovery.
 

94transam

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Jan 17, 2003
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The OS ins freshly installed on a completely different HD.
The two HD's we are talking about are plugged in, but not OS drives.
What do you recommend for data recovery?