cannot access data on slave drive

[Dawn]

I have a 40 gig WD master drive and a 160 gig slave drive
(divided into 4 partitions) I experienced a total system
crash and was forced to delete the partition on my master
drive and reinstall win2k sp3. Now, the problem is that I
cannot access any data off the slave drive. I can see the
entire drive in disk management and can assign it a drive
letter, but, since 2k does not see the individual
partitions, it's NOT finding the data. I tried using WD's
software to recover my info, but, it only offers me the
option to format the drive, which, I could do thru win2k
if I wanted to lose all my data. I also tried changing my
slave to primary and doing an install on one of the empty
partitions, but, due to the fact that even setup will not
recognized mulitple partitions on the drive, I'm left with
no choice but to format the entirety of the drive. I also
tried to see if xp could locate my partitions in
setup...negative results.
Thanks for any help. Or if someone could point me in the
right direction to the answer.

 

[Colon Terminus]

Hi Dawn,

The cardinal rule of data recovery is "NEVER, ever, perform an action on a
damaged disk that might in any way cause write activity."

It's difficult to discern whether your actions have attempted a write
operation to the disk or not. It would seem that they have, in which case
recovery of your data is made less likely.

Your next decision is to ask yourself "Just how much is that data worth to
me?"

Your next move depends on the answer to that question.

If the answer is "Less than 500 bucks." , then you may as well just Fdisk
and Format the drive again.

If the answer is "Oh yeah, it's worth at least 500 bucks.", then visit
OnTrack.com and purchase their EZ Recovery Pro software for $499.00.

If the answer is "Man, I gotta have that stuff. It's worth at least 5,000.00
dollars.", then remove the hard disk and send it off to a professional data
recovery service.

 

[Dawn]

Thanks for the info. I found out that it's not uncommon
for this to happen, and the data is pretty valuable to me,
if only in time, TONS of graphics productions and man, I
don't wanna start from scratch again. My own fault for
not making hard copy backups, but, live and learn. So,
looks like the cc is gonna be whipped out tonite. lol