Hard drive gone

[Guest]

I have a Maxtor 300 GB hard drive that I formatted, installed Vista, and
later decided the support just wasn't there for even basic drivers that I
needed and went back to Windows XP. Unfortunately I have not been able to
get any use out of this drive afterward as it is now only showing 31.49GB no
matter what I do, be it formatting or anything. Luckily I had a backup 120MB
Maxtor hard drive that I am operating from now. The problem is, back in XP,
both drives show up in BIOS, Device manager, and My computer manager, however
in all three, the 300GB device that I had installed Vista on still only shows
31.49GB and I cannot figure out how to get full use out of it again. I've
tried all different utilities, low level formats, complete formats, yet
nothing increases the amount of space on the hard drive. I've tried
installing OS (both Vista and XP) on the culprit drive and they both only
show 31.4GB.

Is it possible that the installation of Vista has permanently ruined the
hard drive?

 

[Guest]

Did you have any form of encription on that drive when Vista was on?

 

[Guest]

Hello

there is one way to fix it, if you have a external hard drive or cd (USB)
you can take the drive out and hook up your screwed up drive to the USB
adapter (unplugged of course) and reformat it. i.e. a laptop or other
computer that will remove all that system info that is on there. (not sure
where, but it is)

this has worked very well for me on this same sort of stuff

good luck, I am considering giving up on the RC "1" install

 

[Norman Diamond]

1. I had a Vista problem that was different from yours but there's a small
chance that it might help you. I don't know what effect a low level format
has on most modern disk drives and didn't know that there were still
utilities to do it, but anyway if it didn't zero out your MBR then it's
still possible for XP to be confused by your corrupted MBR. In my case a
Vista crash wrote its memory dump to the MBR and elsewhere instead of to a
file in its own partition, so Windows 2000 couldn't recover it. I booted a
Knoppix DVD and gnu's "gpart" command did some really good guessing, the 50%
that it got right included the correct starting sector of every partition.
Then gnu's "fdisk" command could recreate the partitions and write a valid
MBR. All of the files in the Vista partition became visible again, but
Vista wouldn't boot. I booted the Vista DVD and did a repair to the booter,
after which Vista booted but couldn't execute most programs because its
self-repair screwed up its drive letters. More repair operations could
temporarily repair the drive letters but they didn't stick. This resulted
in around 3 bug reports on the Connect site, most of which are closed
without explanation, but one of which was closed and then reopened and then
closed saying it's not reproducible. The current ability to boot but
inability to execute most programs is 100% reproducible, that's why the bug
report is closed without explanation.

Anyway, try booting a Knoppix DVD and see if gpart and fdisk can repair your
partition structure.

2. I had a Maxtor problem that was different from yours but not completely
different. I was able to install Windows 2000 onto it, once. After that
the drive's self-identification told the BIOS that the drive had zero size.
So there is something in the drive's firmware that is capable of being
damaged this way, and I don't know any way to repair it. The drive was
replaced under warranty.