A
Arron
I installed windows XP home edition onto a 10gb NTFS harddrive on a computer
with an existing 120gb FAT32 drive almost full with data. Everything went
smooth and worked great for about a month. I tried taking an 80gb FAT32 drive
almost full of data and adding it to my computer changing the positions
around on the cables.
Upon the first boot after the new harddrive was added Windows XP appears to
have done something to both of my fat32 drives and now they show nothing but
gobly gook, I can't access my files. Just random characters show up. It looks
as if XP wrote new file allocation tables to the drives or screwed up the
MBR's all in one motion. The drives still show under properties as FAT32, and
the correct used size and free space show up, but everything is gibberish.
WHAT HAPPENED? I put everything back to normal and my 80gb drive back in my
old comptuer but the drives are still messed up. I tried a system restore to
no success. One of the drives I ran scandisk and it said there were 2 copies
of the file allocation table that do not match and when it tried to fix it,
the problem just looks worse. I downloaded Getdataback and it only recovered
30% of the files it appears with the shareware version.
Can anyone explain to me why windows xp decided to screw up the harddrive
structures? And the best solution to at least recovering as much data as I
can? Is there a way to view the 2 copies of the file allocation table and try
changing them to primary position without deleting them? Could something else
be fixed that was messed up? Is file recovery software my best bet?
I would really appreciate any help recovering my data, and am greatly
disturbed by this fact of windows xp. Thanks.
with an existing 120gb FAT32 drive almost full with data. Everything went
smooth and worked great for about a month. I tried taking an 80gb FAT32 drive
almost full of data and adding it to my computer changing the positions
around on the cables.
Upon the first boot after the new harddrive was added Windows XP appears to
have done something to both of my fat32 drives and now they show nothing but
gobly gook, I can't access my files. Just random characters show up. It looks
as if XP wrote new file allocation tables to the drives or screwed up the
MBR's all in one motion. The drives still show under properties as FAT32, and
the correct used size and free space show up, but everything is gibberish.
WHAT HAPPENED? I put everything back to normal and my 80gb drive back in my
old comptuer but the drives are still messed up. I tried a system restore to
no success. One of the drives I ran scandisk and it said there were 2 copies
of the file allocation table that do not match and when it tried to fix it,
the problem just looks worse. I downloaded Getdataback and it only recovered
30% of the files it appears with the shareware version.
Can anyone explain to me why windows xp decided to screw up the harddrive
structures? And the best solution to at least recovering as much data as I
can? Is there a way to view the 2 copies of the file allocation table and try
changing them to primary position without deleting them? Could something else
be fixed that was messed up? Is file recovery software my best bet?
I would really appreciate any help recovering my data, and am greatly
disturbed by this fact of windows xp. Thanks.