130gb vanished!

[sadge]

Sorry that my first post on these forum's is a cry for help.. but i'm tearing my hair out over this.

Basically, I have 3 hard drives - 37gb WD raptor (sata), 300gb maxtor (sata), 160gb Maxtor (IDE). Today I turned on my PC and BAM! ..all partitions from the 160gb maxtor have gone. I open up windows disk management which tells me that the drive (Disk 0) has ~30000mb of unpartitioned space, and thats it! There was over 100gb of stuff on there before this happened so I really really hope its not gone forever.

I've looked into various software for data and partition recovery but most of it is fairly expensive and i'd want to know it was gonna work before I forked out the cash.

Can I save my data from oblivion?

 

[nmarchini]

Sounds nasty, have you tried to roll back using system restore to a point when it was working? OS might just be playing silly buggers and not seeing it as it should.

If not then I have good recovery boot disk that has some freeware file recovery tools on it, let me know if you want a copy to try before you shell out some cash.

 

[evongugg]

Take the disk out and hook it up to another computer. See if the data is back.
This has happened to me a lot with external hard drives. Once hooked up to another computer the data was back.

 

[SuperFly03]

Basically, I have 3 hard drives - 37gb WD raptor (sata), 300gb maxtor (sata), 160gb Maxtor (IDE). Today I turned on my PC and BAM! ..all partitions from the 160gb maxtor have gone. I open up windows disk management which tells me that the drive (Disk 0) has ~30000mb of unpartitioned space, and thats it! There was over 100gb of stuff on there before this happened so I really really hope its not gone forever.

I've looked into various software for data and partition recovery but most of it is fairly expensive and i'd want to know it was gonna work before I forked out the cash.

Can I save my data from oblivion?

Almost everyone's first post is some sort of issue, don't apologize. We are here to help because we've all been there.

Back to your issue. From what I can see, your Raptor and 300GB are on a different controller than your 160GB hard drive. I think it is possible that your IDE controller went skitzoid. I don't have alot of reasoning behind that other than hard drives don't lose partitions for no reason. Unless you some how deleted the master file table, which would be a neat trick if you didn't do anything.

Have you run any unusual programs lately? Anything new?

Don't do anything to the disk, like try to format it or anything until we figure something out (except try and plug it into another comp). When a file is deleted, it isn't, the hard disk just sets the sector available for rewrite so the file is there until something overwrites the sector.

Try evongugg's idea, he could easily be right.