Slave drive unallocated, suddenly

[InvaderZim]

I am new here and I am frustrated with my second drive. I recently
installed removeable drive bays and inserted in the master position an 80 GB
Western digital to insall a fesh copy of XP Pro (to play around with some
settings), this is when things got frustrating. First the drives were not
recognized until I switch them from cable select to master/slave. After a
few swaps of the 120 GB Maxtor with XP Pro and the newly installed Xp Pro on
the 80 GB, the second drive suddenly became "unallocated". Does this mean I
lost all my data on my back up drive? The drive is NTFS if that matters, I
tried to boot with a win98 boot disk to use fdisk and see what is going on,
however, fdisk didn't see the disk, but it did see the primary 120 GB drive
as a 51 GB NTFS drive. Any help will be greatly appreciated, most of the
data is backed up except the newer stuff isn't and it is important.

 

[Richard Urban]

The drive "was" NTFS and is now "unallocated". That means that the file
system has become unrecognizable - there is none present!

There may be ways to reactivate the partition but I have never been
successful at doing this. What I have been successful at doing is recovering
the files from the unallocated partition.

Search Google under File Recovery for some of the programs available. You DO
get what you pay for!

--
Regards:

Richard Urban

aka Crusty (-: Old B@stard

 

[InvaderZim]

Thanks for the response, I will try that.

The drive "was" NTFS and is now "unallocated". That means that the file
system has become unrecognizable - there is none present!

There may be ways to reactivate the partition but I have never been
successful at doing this. What I have been successful at doing is recovering
the files from the unallocated partition.

Search Google under File Recovery for some of the programs available. You DO
get what you pay for!

--
Regards:

Richard Urban

aka Crusty (-: Old B@stard