Data On Second Hard Drive Disappeared After Format

ashley

Distinguished
May 2, 2004
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Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage (More info?)

I was formatting the hard drive that has Windows XP on it with a
Windows98 bootdisk and then use fdisk to partition the hard drive
for the first time. I have a second hard drive that I backed up
all my files to. I have done this successfully before only I've
never used fdisk before.

I of course ran into the problem of not being able to format
drive C: because it was formatted into NTFS. I deleted the
partition and created another one using fdisk. I was then able to
format. I used Windows XP to partition the hard drive and I
installed Windows onto that hard drive.

When Windows installed all my data on the second hard drive was
gone and all space on that drive was 100% free. I do not at all
understand how this happened. Could I have deleted the partition
on that hard drive with fdisk? Maybe my BIOS loaded that hard
drive at some point?

I don't know, this didn't happen to me last time, but I am in the
process of using data recovery programs to try and get my data
back. I have done nothing to this drive so far so as to not
overwrite data and I've hardly done anything to my other drives
except install some programs.

I am not having any luck, but the data recovery programs I am
using are a little above my head. Scans of my drive do not turn
up any user data.. only a few system files.

Does anyone know of any other data recovery programs I could try?
I have used R-Studio from r-studio.com and Recover-It-All from
dtidata.com.

Thank you.
 

joeP

Distinguished
Dec 31, 2007
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18,780
Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage (More info?)

"Ashley" <cacophony@cfl.rr.com> wrote in message
news:Urhxd.176902$6w6.43923@tornado.tampabay.rr.com...
> When Windows installed all my data on the second hard drive was
> gone and all space on that drive was 100% free.

If you mean that all disk space is shown as unallocated in Disk Management
you can try our DiskPatch 2.0 demo and see if it detects the partition.

If you want you can post the logfile in our support forum.

You can create an analysis log as follows:

* Start DiskPatch
* select the appropriate disk
* go to [Tools] menu
* select [Analyze Disk]
* let the scan finish
* exit DiskPatch

--
Kind regards,
Joep

D I Y D a t a R e c o v e r y . N L - Data & Disaster Recovery Tools

http://www.diydatarecovery.nl
http://www.diydatarecovery.com

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