harddrive partition

[s4tran]

I recently had a computer crash. Before it crashed it would shut itself down
and I would have to either unplug at back of computer of flip power switch on
surge protector before computer would come back on. I have subsuquently
replaced mother board and power supply and slaved out old harddrive and put
in a new hard drive. Once I was back up and running, I noticed that some of
my files were missing including the folder I had a years worth of digital
pictures. I also discoverd that part of my old hard drive is now
unpartitioned. What could have caused this. I know I partitioned the entire
drive when I first started with the original harddrive. If there is
information on the hardrive in the area that became unpartitioned is there
any way of retrieving this information?

 

[Guest]

Try moving the old hd to another IDE connection,make sure the jumper pins
are set correctly.Were you installing xp with both drives connected to the
pc,
the slave must be unplugged during xp installation.

 

[Malke]

I recently had a computer crash. Before it crashed it would shut itself
down and I would have to either unplug at back of computer of flip power
switch on surge protector before computer would come back on. I have
subsuquently replaced mother board and power supply and slaved out old
harddrive and put in a new hard drive. Once I was back up and running, I
noticed that some of my files were missing including the folder I had a
years worth of digital pictures. I also discoverd that part of my old hard
drive is now unpartitioned. What could have caused this. I know I
partitioned the entire drive when I first started with the original
harddrive. If there is information on the hardrive in the area that became
unpartitioned is there any way of retrieving this information?

The file system is damaged. The hard shutdowns you performed are probably
the reason. If you have a high degree of computer skill you can use a
partition editor to fix the partition. I'm guessing from your post that
this would be a bad choice for you to do. I'm not saying that to hurt your
feelings, just being practical.

You could also try data recovery software on the drive. I use Ontrack's Easy
Recovery Pro, but it is expensive. Here are some links to other data
recovery software:

R-Studio - http://www.r-tt.com/
Ontrack's EasyRecovery - http://www.ontrack.com/software/

If you have no experience in doing software data recovery, call some local
professional computer repair shops and see what they do. Not all shops do
data recovery, but the ones that do will have more expensive software than
you might want to buy.

If the data is crucial, you should probably just send the drive to a
professional data recovery company. I prefer Drive Savers, but there are
others. Professional data recovery costs usually start at around $500USD
and go up from there.

DriveSavers - http://www.drivesavers.com
Seagate Data Recovery Services - https://www.seagatedatarecovery.com/

To prevent future data loss, implement a backup policy of burning the data
to DVD and taking the backups off-site or put them in a fireproof cabinet.

Malke