After Win XP install data on slave HDD gone!

[jayharle]

I formated my C: drive during installation of Windows XP, everything installed fine. After installing I went into "My Computer" and double clicked my second (slave) HDD only to find that a message pops up saying "This drive needs to be formatted, format now?". The Windows XP install must have screwed up the drive somhow and now I can't access any of the important data that I had saved on there. Has anybody else out there had this problem? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[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

[braindead]

Not sure if this will work for your problem. Go to control panel, administrative tools, click on disk management, if you see the drive listed there, click on it to hi light it then right click select mark patition as active. It's worked for me before but I was doing a drive switch so it may not work for you.

[TopFarmer]

That does seem to be a all to common problem. TESTDISK normally will work but you should read the how to use. It says you can use it in XP but I have only used it with a 98 boot floppy, pure dos. (free) http://www.cgsecurity.org/index.html?testdisk.html

Partition Doctor clams it will also fix the problem (have not used) ($$).


****** edited.
Just noticed that this is an old post from 04.