Hard Drive went bonkers?

[510kut]

So I have two HDs. A 160 GB Hitachi and 200 GB Maxtor. I hadn't really used the Maxtor much until recently because it use to be in my ps2, and then I took it out so it sat around. Until Vista came out and I decided I wanted to give it a whirl so I installed Vista on the Maxtor and I have XP on my Hitachi. I set the boot priority so it would boot from the Maxtor first. Today I turn on my computer, and when I got into Vista my mouse wasn't responding. This has happened before and a restart would fix the problem so I go to restart except it boots into XP. I tried restarting a couple more times and messed with the boot priority nothing seems to fix it. Bios still recognizes the drive, although it doesn't show up in windows. When I go to Disk Manager it says the drive is unallocated... doesnt sound good :/ Does anyone know what could have happened? And if there is any way to fix it? There are some things I've done recently that is saved on that drive. Thanks.

 

[Jiggz]

You can try re-creating the MBR and also the FAT table by going to the Recovery Console. Or use a third party software like Partition Magic.

 

[510kut]

Should I try to do this in Vista or XP?

btw do you have any idea... why this happened?

 

[Nocturnal]

Try GetDataBack (you can try the trial) and see if you can get the program to read the drive and the contents. The trial limits you to only reading the contents but not actually retrieving them.

 

[510kut]

Weird tried, turned on my comp again today and it tried to boot from the Maxtor and gave me something like "Invalid Boot Partition" or something... since I left the boot priority alone. And now when I get back into XP I have access to the Maxtor drive. I think I'm just going to transfer stuff over and then format it.