Lost partition

[greymat]

When I went to bed last night, my disc looked like this:


EISA 7.8GB rescue - C: 20.31GB NTFS - D: 20GB FAT32 - [x F:10GB -
freespace 20.3GB - s:70GB]

(primary partitions except [x.] extended partition). When I booted up
this morning, it looked like this:

EISA 7.8GB rescue - C: 20.31GB NTFS - D: 20GB NTFS - [x F:10GB -
freespace 90.89GB]

The lost partition contains all my data, and was an NTFS volume. The
only thing that happened in between was installing WinXP on D: and
using EasyBCD to try and add an entry to the vista bcd, but I didn't
think that should mess with the MFT.

Is my partition retrievable? My data is not so valuable that I would
stretch to professional recovery fees, but it's more than just a bit
annoying.

Could this be OS related, particularly in that there was unallocated
space in an extended partition before the volume in question, or does
it mean that my (new) hard drive is dodgy?

Thanks

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

When I went to bed last night, my disc looked like this:


EISA 7.8GB rescue - C: 20.31GB NTFS - D: 20GB FAT32 - [x F:10GB -
freespace 20.3GB - s:70GB]

(primary partitions except [x.] extended partition). When I booted up
this morning, it looked like this:

EISA 7.8GB rescue - C: 20.31GB NTFS - D: 20GB NTFS - [x F:10GB -
freespace 90.89GB]

The lost partition contains all my data, and was an NTFS volume. The
only thing that happened in between was installing WinXP on D: and
using EasyBCD to try and add an entry to the vista bcd, but I didn't
think that should mess with the MFT.

Is my partition retrievable? My data is not so valuable that I would
stretch to professional recovery fees, but it's more than just a bit
annoying.

Could this be OS related, particularly in that there was unallocated
space in an extended partition before the volume in question, or does
it mean that my (new) hard drive is dodgy?

Thanks

Have a look at the thread with the Subject line "installed 2nd
HD ==> partitions gone", posted here four days ago.

 

[Andy]

The disk seems to be 160GB in size. Most likely your XP installation
was not capable of accessing large (> 137GB) disk drives, and
"removed" the last logical volume.

 

[greymat]

Thanks for the suggestions.

The pics are from the disk management snap in, and mountvol.exe shows
the same volumes.

The disc shows up as 149.05GB in both WinXP and Vista, and I've
previously installed XP on a 160GB drive from this installation cd, so
I don't think that's the problem.

The data must still be there, which is very frustrating. There must
be a way to get it back.

Thanks