"Unallocated" ATA HD's

[Weatherton]

I began capturing home movies with a fireware encoder and noticed that my PATA drives were not being recognized. When I checked in disk manager I saw that the drives are considered "unallocated" -- the partitions are full of files, any ideas? I've tried unplugging everything but the drives... they are recognized by the BIOS and, of course, also, by Windows in disk manager...

*edit* I also tried using the parallel ports for my DVD-drives but the same issue appeared. I even tried using a SATA adapter I had lying around, same result... the drive is recognized but considered unallocated I have quite a bit of stuff on these drives, I've been diligent with backups so completely vital files are not necessarily there but I had done some backing up between the two drives, so for both to disappear would mean losing those files

Please help, I'd like to access the files on these drives.

 

[MichaelD]

It sounds like something else is using the resources (IRQ's?) that those drives were using. Have you tried removing that Firewire capture card?

 

[Weatherton]

I tried removing the capture card as well as several of my other hard drives...

 

[Weatherton]

Mods, maybe I should have posted this in "Technical Support." If so, please move this to that section. Thanks.

 

[tw1164]

Corrupt MBR or partition table? Have you tried fixing the mbr?

 

[acole1]

Originally posted by: tw1164
Corrupt MBR or partition table? Have you tried fixing the mbr?

This sounds likely. My friend has this happen to him about a month back, but was able to recover the files with a program that cost him about $40. He then reformated the drive and it worked great.

We suspected it might have something to do with not having enough power so on boot up the drive starts up then dies shortly thereafter destroying the partition table.

...but its just a theory.

 

[corkyg]

Originally posted by: tw1164
Corrupt MBR or partition table? Have you tried fixing the mbr?

:thumbsup:

 

[Weatherton]

How do I repair the MBR in XP?

So the partition table may have gotten currupted? That seems odd... my PSU is pretty beefy too...

 

[Weatherton]

*bump*

 

[corkyg]

There are many programs out there to do an MBR and/or partition table repair. Here's a freebie:

MBR

 

[Weatherton]

Son of a, when I was unplugging hard drives to make sure I eliminated other factors, I unplugged just one drive from a RAID 1 array. When I tried to boot again it said there was a problem, I tried to rebuild, it said no, so I told it to copy the contents of one of the RAID 1 drives to the other drive and now windows has the same issue with this RAID 1 as it does with the other drives "Unallocated." This has just become critical, I have lost over 500GB of irreplacable data and I need to do everything I can to get it back -- PLEASE HELP, I'm losing it over here! I spent thousands of hours creating that data!! I can't believe this, I really can't....