Lost Data - 137 Gig limit

[francois]

Hi guys

I wanted to make a backup of a small drive on my 160 gig WD drive. So
i've put both drives in some old Duron on WinXP, and seeing it i could
browse to the files, i assumed windows correctly recognized the
partition (160 gig). Unfortunatly, i wrote some files on the 160 gig
and when i was done, all the files on the drive had disapeared (the
new files and what used to be on it). Basicly, i lost 100 gig of datas
(the partition complety disapeared ... Now appears as 160gig
unallocated space in partition magic). I tried different data recovery
tools, and none were usefull (none of them see the old partition). Am
i using the softwares incorrectly ?

What other softwares might help for this particular case ?

Thanks in advance!

François

 

[Arno Wagner]

Hi guys

I wanted to make a backup of a small drive on my 160 gig WD drive. So
i've put both drives in some old Duron on WinXP, and seeing it i could
browse to the files, i assumed windows correctly recognized the
partition (160 gig). Unfortunatly, i wrote some files on the 160 gig
and when i was done, all the files on the drive had disapeared (the
new files and what used to be on it). Basicly, i lost 100 gig of datas
(the partition complety disapeared ... Now appears as 160gig
unallocated space in partition magic). I tried different data recovery
tools, and none were usefull (none of them see the old partition). Am
i using the softwares incorrectly ?

I think what happened is that a defective HDD driver/filesystem
implementation did not tell the OS it cannot deal with the disk size.
The the OS happily did sequential writes, which at some point "wrap-
around" (integer overflow) and continue at the start of the disk.
Essentially your partition table and part of the disk contents
would have been overwritten if that is what happened. There is
no way to recover the overwritten data. There might be a chance
to revover some of the rest of the data, but I am doubtful.

What other softwares might help for this particular case ?

What filesystem? FAT or NTFS? (Not that I know of such tools,
but others here might and they will need this info.)

Arno

 

[dbData]

You may be able to find information to help at
http://www.howtorecoverdata.com.