[Shimm]

Hi mate, YES it keeps on happening to me!!

Had 2 drives, a 128gig and a 250gig, both IDE's, both filled to the brim with important data, and then i managed to contract weird problems with the normal day to day running of the system such as real slow bootups etc. Ran virus scans, antispyware etc ... all the usual and decided to be safe and wipe the system clean by installing a new FRESH copy of XP pro.

Both drives were partioned b4 the wipe - each partition was about 100gig, eg M:full of Music V:full of Videos I:important Doccs etc

Put my XP Pro disk in the DVD-Rom drive, booted the system up and Windows Setup started running. Its at that point that it came up with a message stating....windows cant read this drive - format it! on all drives....err yeah right like im gonna do that eh

Took an old 40 gig drive, put it in the system and performed a fresh install, downloaded all service packs, blah blah blah - ages later, connected the 128 and 250 gig hard drives expecting them now to show me all my precious data, and guess wot.......all blank .....do you want to format this drive!!

Have researched the net and found a billion programs that can recover data etc - the one that was quite complicated but retrieved 95% of all of my data was a program called GetNTFSBack - brilliant mate - go get it honest!

I had to buy a 400gig hard drive to copy the other two drives data onto and opted this time for a SATA drive. Copied all the data - briliant !! back and runnin again.

Then i thought, ang on a mo, lets do the same thing again and see wot appens ( seein as i then knew i could recover my data ) ...... repeated the above and yet again it couldnt see any drive AND the new 400 gig lol.

Hmm, im lost - my brain hurts. Im now hunting around the net trying to find out why, came across your post and thought id take the time to inform you that your not alone lol.

Hopefully someone else will see both our posts,call us retards and tell us what were doin wrong eh.

All the best
Shimm