Recovering an uninitialized NTFS hard disk

[Poldie]

I booted from my XP SP2 CD to try and perform scandisk on a drive. (I
couldn't defrag it because there was some problem or other which
Windows suggested I run scandisk to fix). The PC loaded up the
drivers etc, but then the PC rebooted. Great. Even better, now, my
other 300gb drive is showing as "not initialized" and "unallocated" in
the Computer Management tool. This has happened before, and I fixed
it by initializing it, then running some freeware app to recover
files, which it sort of did, although it couldn't get everything back,
but it was mostly ok. I have no idea why this happens. It doesn't
seem to be something which I can find references to on the net. My
PC is ok apart from this, and I have no idea why it happens. I have
two physical drives. One is partitioned as C: and D:, which are fine,
and the other is F:.

So my questions are:

1) Why does this happen?
2) Which app do you recommend I use to recover the data?
3) Is there a way of simply `initializing` the drive and have it
rebuild the various structures it needs to see the data which is
manifestly still perfectly intact on the drive?

Cheers!

 

[Joseph Conway [MSFT]]

1. This happens typically from hardware failure (or imminent failure). It
can also be caused by misconfiguration on the system in regards to the
layout of the drives.
2. Data recovery is done by several agencies online, I know that a lot of
people have had success with OnTrack
3.Typically if you have a drive thats become unitialized, you can choose to
reinitialize it and its fine. If the disk structures are being re-written
(such as the MBR and boot sector), then you would be in the data loss
scenario you are seeing now.

Joseph W. Conway, MCSE
Windows Server Group

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.