Lost HD Data.

[mekworld]

Just rebuilt my MCE machine and the secondary drive with my 186gb of recordings is now showing up under XP as unallocated even though I didn't touch during teh installation.. oh dear.

Now I'm going to try a recovery fixmbr from the recovery console to try and get it back but if this fails can anyone recommend some standalone software that could possible fix the partition (I tried BinaryBiz VirtualLab 5.0 from downloads.com) and this can see the data so I'm hoping all is not loss. It could also retrieve the data but as I said its 186gb of the stuff and I don't have a drive big enough to transfer it to.

So whats good software for this sort of thing these days.. don't mind paying as long as its not astronomical and I really would like it to work offline as oppose to Virtual Lab which requires a connection.


Any ideas?
Thanks.

[peterb]

Sounds like a config problem rather than lost data, especially if you really haven't touched the disk at all. Have a GOOD look at that before you start applying software tools to the disk.

[Black Jack]

Ive had problems like this before, the secondary HDD was setup as a dynamic disk, and now it won't be recognised under XP home but it would have worked under Pro but windows has already converted the partition to unallocated. There is no easy fix too be honest. I just payed for a version of File Scavanger. Don't worry none of your data is lost, You need a drive with equal space as you want to recover cos you gotta recover the whole HDD and then reformat it under a basic drive partition. Tell me how you do mate!!

[0iD]

Boot up using a live CD such as Knoppix & view the disk that way.

[mekworld]

Cheers guys, was thinking about trying Knoppix but couldn't find my c.d., the main problem I have is I don't have a HD anywhere near that size.

Might have to do it in some sort of piecemeal fashion or sacrifice the recordings I really no longer want though I don't know if I can bring myself to get rid of teh entire animated Spiderman series.

[Dav0s]

do you need someone to send you a copy of knoppix? that cd be arranged

[MD]

can't you do the following?, (might need an XP powered machine, cant quote if MCE can do this)

Start >> Settings >> Control Panel >> Administrator Tools >> Computer Management >> Disk Management >> right click on the inactive partion and 'mark partition as active'

Matt.

[mekworld]

do you need someone to send you a copy of knoppix? that cd be arranged

Cheers, I'll just set it for download tonight and go get some blank cd-r's tomorrow morning.

can't you do the following?

If only it was that easy............

From what another tool has managed to tell my total sectors is now different even though I haven't changed my bios settings for the HD (honest!!! though I have tried large, lba, and chs to be on the safe side after the messup). Which is why I figure I can't see it anymore. Loaded up PQ to see if that could do anything and it won't even load something about EZDrive being installed (uhm fresh build!! *confused*).

So the saga goes on... best see how much transferrable HD space I can muster between all my pc's.

[mekworld]

Scavenger could both restore the data to another drive, but Partition Disk Doctor fixed the partition in five minutes and gave me access to the data without restoring....

So PDD gets my thumbs up, now all I gotta do is compress all these dvr-ms files so I can stack em on an other drive.

Cheers for all the help.

[0iD]

Glad it all worked out in the end!