Hard Drive Wiped Out - Why?

[Britboy]

I recently installed a cendyne 4x dvd -r burner. I removed a cd burner as I no longer needed it. My PC is set up as follows on a shuttle KT266A mobo w/athlon 1600 XP, Windows XP Pro:

Maxtor 60GB - Master IDE1
WD 120GB - Slave IDE2

Cendyne DVD-R - Master IDE2

After installing the burner (works fine) I tried to access my WD drive. A message came up stating 'this drive is not formatted, do you want to format it now?'. Looking at the properties for it, it said 'raw'. It worked fine before and had about 60GB of stuff on it, formatted NTFS, same as my 60GB drive. The drive is about a year old and I've had no problems with it.

I took the drive out and installed it in another PC as the slave, got the same message, so somehow all the data got wiped off!

Any idea why this happened?
Should I get another HD
Should I get another mobo (if so what do you recommend and how easy will it be to get the processor switched over)

I'd rather spend some money on reliable hardware than have a repeat of this problem.

Thanks in advance for any insight.

Britboy

 

[emjem]

It sounds like the boot sector got corrupted. So the data is probably still on the hdd. I'm not familiar with WD but DataLifeguard or whatever it's called should have a utility that will fix this for you.

 

[HappyCracker]

Why do you have it as slave on IDE2 with the burner as master? Put both HDs on the same channel and the burner as master on IDE2 and hopefully that might help. Also check your jumpers on all three devices; the ones you didn't move around anyway

 

[Rufio]

same thing happened to me.

i just sat there and cried.

 

[Britboy]

Thanks for the replies, I screwed up my original post, I do have the second hard drive on IDE1, not IDE2. I can't recover the data as I have already reformatted the drive!:brokenheart: