Reinstall and partition gone

[TheAntipop]

I just reinstalled Win2k Pro and while i usually am able to backup everything to my second partition on my HD, this time the second partition is no longer available. Every way I know how to access it comes up with an error message. I did a clean reinstall with a re-creation of primary partition, but would that screw the second one up?. I would really like to be able to access it without reformatting the second partitoin as well as it contains all my backed up files.

eh, i'll procrastinate later...

 

[NickM]

QUOTE: <font color=blue>"...re-creation of primary partition..."</font color=blue>

What's that? You mean you deleted your first partition, then did create a new one instead?

What file sistem was on your harddrive before, and what kind of space was shown instead of your second partition when you did the reinstall of Win2000?
What kinds of space the Disk Manager shows you on your harddrive now?

 

[TheAntipop]

Well I took the lazy approach to simply reformatting my primary partition. I deleted it, then re-created it under the Win2000 installer. Both my primary and secondary partitions are NTFS file systems.
The weird thing is that the second partition shows up under Windows Explorer as Drive D:. Under the disk manager it also shows up Drive D: as a healthy NTFS partition. But everytime I try to access it under My Computer, for example, I get the error message "D:\ is not accessible. Access is denied." I tried the same things under the command prompt and get "Access is denied." At first I thought it was a permissions issue because the drive was shared in my former Win install, but the permissions are set to full-access. So I the only thing I can think of is that by deleting my primary partition, I somehow screwed up the formatting of the entire hard drive.

eh, i'll procrastinate later...

 

[juice]

Have you tried moving this hard disk to another computer that can read ntfs?

<font color=blue> I know nothing that is why i am here at THG!</font color=blue>

 

[NickM]

Might be some utility for harddrive troubleshooting or data recovery to download from the manufacturer’s site? I don’t know.

What I would try in order to recover the data. Sorry, I don't have a better idea... you need temporarily... a second harddrive for backup purpose.
Try to mirror (Ghost) the whole harddrive, if it works. Put the same (master) jumper settings before mirroring, install on separate IDE.
After that, work only with the mirrored harddrive. Boot from the CD-ROM and try to do second installation of Win2000, directly into the trouble partition that supposed to be recognizable as NTFS, but you couldn’t get access to the data. If the Win2000 Install really recognizes the partition and allows you to do that without formatting.
You have to be sure that you had enough space beside the data and whatever else supposed to be there for the second installation on that seemed to be lost partition.
Sorry, if it’s not helpful.

 

[TheAntipop]

well just in case anyone ever has a similar problem, i have figured out the answer to my dillema. when i performed the deletion and recreation of my primary partition, the security settings of the secondary ntfs partition were altered so that the former memeory address of the primary partition was the only "user" allowed to access the partition. weird problem, but a simple answer that i overlooked.

eh, i'll procrastinate later...