Partitions disappeared out of thin air!

[SugarTooth]

Windows 98SE, 160GB Maxtor drive. C is 10GB, the rest of drive was split into two ~75GB partitions - D & E. Booted up today, no D & E. Not showing up anywhere and fdisk shows C and another unformatted 8GB or so. Not looking good, I know. Has anyone ever heard of this? Definitely a new one to me. If nothing can be done, I figure I can probably hook the drive up to another system and use data recovery utilities, but...any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Aleksandar]

Too bad you dont use windows xp anyway you need to get something like Partrition magic about the data on the drive i dont see how you can get it out good luck

 

[nanaki333]

same thing happened to me. i booted up one day and i couldn't get into windows. boot off the xp disc and it showed my former main partition as UNKNOWN. Mine was a 120GB WD drive formatted with basic disk. Funny thing is, a week after mine did this, my former bosses did the same exact thing, but with an 80GB WD. Even funnier, my friend whom i work with now had it happen with his 120GB WD which was converted to dynamic disk. Must be the season for hdd failure. There's lots of recovery software out there that can get your data off it. reinstall windows on a new drive and just go on download.com and find some recovery software that works.

 

[SugarTooth]

Thanks nanaki, that's what I figured I would be doing. This drive is a Maxtor - though my last one to fail was a WD. The worst part is that this Maxtor is only a few months old. Something is going on with HDs these days...