Files & Folders lost after installing 180GB drive to non-compliant m/b. Poss. to recover files/folde

[Peter]

I had an almost full 180GB drive on installed on a PCI IDE card that
could handle a drive of that size. It was formatted as a single large
partition. A couple of days ago, forgetting about the 137GB limit on
my older motherboard bios I plugged the 180GB drive into it.

After no obvious objection from the PC and happened to notice a bunch
of files missing on my 180GB drive. I ran chkdsk (without the /f) but
noticed no change. No writes have been made to the 180GB drive.

I then put the drive back on the PCI IDE controller and whilst it now
behaves more normally many of the files and folders it previously
contained are missing.

Is there any strategy I can use to get these file/folders back? There
are thousands of them so I am looking for something automatic if
possible!

 

[Ian Roberts]

snip....

Is there any strategy I can use to get these file/folders back? There
are thousands of them so I am looking for something automatic if
possible!

There are a couple of software utilities you could try - see links below.
Have a read and see which might suit you best...

Hope these can help. They have worked for me.

Good Luck

Ian I^)

http://www.recovermyfiles.com/

http://www.file-saver.com/undelete/

 

[Andy]

I had an almost full 180GB drive on installed on a PCI IDE card that
could handle a drive of that size. It was formatted as a single large
partition. A couple of days ago, forgetting about the 137GB limit on
my older motherboard bios I plugged the 180GB drive into it.

After no obvious objection from the PC and happened to notice a bunch
of files missing on my 180GB drive. I ran chkdsk (without the /f) but
noticed no change. No writes have been made to the 180GB drive.

Did you watch the monitor when the PC first booted up with the newly
connected 180GB drive? You don't say what OS you're running, but
unless you tell it not to, Windows often will repair what it believes
to be a faulty file system during its boot phase.

 

[Satish Bhalla]

You can try using DiskView - http://www.diskview.com/diskview.htm to see if
the disk space usage is expected. This will show you the disk space usage
as Pie and bar charts from Windows Explorer itself.

Sometimes whole folders get moved easily within Windows Explorer, and its
hard to find out where they went. By seeing the folders under DiskView you
could see if any folder is having an unexpected size.