Problems with XP recognizing HARD DRIVE! HELP ME!

[me88me]

I'm sooo irritated now.. i had an old system with two hard drive. Maxtor
and IBM which were 40 gig and 80 respectively. well i just went and
bought a new motherboard and CPU and an 200 gig seagate hard drive.

So i backed up all my stuff from my 40 giger since it was my primary
drive to my 80 giger the IBM hard drive. I build the computer and put
in the 200 giger and the IBM 80 giger which is with all MY USEFUL and
NEEDED DATA. i install windows and everything and when i check My
Computer. it shows the Seagate hard drive but it doesn't show the IBM
hard drive.

i check the device manager and it see the IBM hard drive but when i ask
it to populate the hard drive.. it shows everything as ZERO.. i asked
all my tech friends around and they told me that NTSP and FAT32 are
different things or whatever and that it might not see the data in
there.. so they told me to reinstall an OS on it but partition it for
10 gigs so that i won't lose all my data..

I installed Windows XP on my partitioned IBM hard drive but it only
shows 10 gigs which i partitioned but not the other 70 gigs of my
data...

HELP ME.. WHAT DO I DOOOOOO!!! Any advice would do.. i read up on
somethings and tried but it has not worked yet.. any ideas or advice
would be GREATLY APPRECIATED!!!

 

[D.Currie]

I'm sooo irritated now.. i had an old system with two hard drive. Maxtor
and IBM which were 40 gig and 80 respectively. well i just went and
bought a new motherboard and CPU and an 200 gig seagate hard drive.

So i backed up all my stuff from my 40 giger since it was my primary
drive to my 80 giger the IBM hard drive. I build the computer and put
in the 200 giger and the IBM 80 giger which is with all MY USEFUL and
NEEDED DATA. i install windows and everything and when i check My
Computer. it shows the Seagate hard drive but it doesn't show the IBM
hard drive.

i check the device manager and it see the IBM hard drive but when i ask
it to populate the hard drive.. it shows everything as ZERO.. i asked
all my tech friends around and they told me that NTSP and FAT32 are
different things or whatever and that it might not see the data in
there.. so they told me to reinstall an OS on it but partition it for
10 gigs so that i won't lose all my data..

I installed Windows XP on my partitioned IBM hard drive but it only
shows 10 gigs which i partitioned but not the other 70 gigs of my
data...

HELP ME.. WHAT DO I DOOOOOO!!! Any advice would do.. i read up on
somethings and tried but it has not worked yet.. any ideas or advice
would be GREATLY APPRECIATED!!!

About the only way you could have created a new 10Gb partition on that 80Gb
drive would be to destroy the existing partition. And that's where you data
was. Notice, I said "was"?

Your best bet for recovery is to stop using that 80 Gb drive, because every
time you write to it, you're risking the destruction of the data on it. What
you should do is install the new drive, get that working, then start looking
into data recovery software or having someone who knows what they're doing
recover the data for you. The person who told you to create that 10Gb
partition is probably not who you want to ask. And the people who were
talking about NTFS and fat32 were way off base, too.

There was possibly a very simple solution to getting to that data, but that
was before you partitioned it. Now it's too late for that, unfortunately.

 

[CWatters]

About the only way you could have created a new 10Gb partition on that 80Gb
drive would be to destroy the existing partition. And that's where you data
was. Notice, I said "was"?

As DC says partioning a drive that wasn't working correctly is asking for
trouible.

Did you hook both drives on the one cable? Sometimes diifferent makes don't
like sharing the same cable. I think I would have tried connecting the 80g
to another IDE socket on the motherboard using an 80 way cable. I don't
recommend you try this now. Best get the drive looked at by a professional.

 

[dagdabrona]

Hi,

If you wish to restore data, Active@ Undelete can be used. Great tool
indeed.
http://www.active-undelete.com/

 

[chad]

And if you want to do this on the cheap, you might want to first try
out some of these freeware data recovery tools:

http://free-backup.info/data-recovery-software.htm