HD partition causing freezing

[derek2006]

My 500GB hard drive is put into 3 partitions. #1 is 4GB for page file. #2 is just general backup. And #3 is 30GB and reserved for Music and the Itunes Library. There is 20GB of music/podcasts on there that I do not want to loose.

So yesterday everything was working fine I was listening to Itunes, chatting, and just regular everyday things. My dad was in the utility room switching breakers off to another room and just guessing and checking them all. He hit mine and the power went out to my computer. When the power came back the computer started to boot again. Usually I can be in windows with every startup program fully loaded in about 25 seconds. Not this time, it took about 2 minutes. Mainly because after the XP loading bar went away it sat at a black screen for a minute and then at the logging on screen ( A screen I haven't seen for such a long time I forgot it was there, because it usually immediately displays the background picture) for 45 seconds. Once logged on all programs are fast again , the programs that didn't need access to that partition anyway. I load Itunes and it takes a long time and comes up with an error saying the library is missing. I clicked my computer (took 20 seconds to come up) and notice that where my drive "Itunes (M)" was renamed to "Local Disk (M)" with no sharing hand underneath it or any data on it. The other 2 partitions are completely fine and easily accessible. I tried to run data recovery programs on that partition but they all stop responding. It's almost like Partition M was reformatted. Also I hooked the HD into another computer and it went slow too for bootup and couldn't read that partition. What should I do, any free data recovery programs you recommend?

Specs (19 months old):
Gigabyte P965 DS3 Rev. 1
Processor:
Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 @ 3.33GHz 1.44v
Memory:
2GB Corsair @ 834Mhz 4-4-4-12 @ 2.1v
Hard Drive:
240GB of Raid 0, 500GB storage
Video Card:
PNY 8800GTS 320 Core: 500/650, Shaders: 1200/1620, Ram 1.6/2GHZ.
Monitor:
22inch 2ms 1680x1050 Acer
Sound Card:
X-Fi XtremeGamer
Speakers/Headphones:
Logitech THX Z-5300e 5.1 or SENNHEISER PX100 Headphones
Keyboard:
Logitech Multimedia Pro
Mouse:
Microsoft 5 button optical intellimouse 1.1A
Mouse Surface:
A cheap mousepad.
Operating System:
Windows XP Professional SP2

 

[derek2006]

I deleted that partition no formated. It increased the performance 10 fold and made bootup instant. But the data is still there, any chance of recovery?

 

[derek2006]

I found a program called Recover My Files. It found the partition and is recovering them now. It is half done and I can access my music and it works fine. So for anyone that ever has a similar problem. Try it.

 

[myi4u]

I had experienced similar problems but it happened because I accidentally deleted my partition during Vista installation. I was quite panic but I waited until the Vista was completely installed. However, I did not go through Vista to recreate the partition because I was afraid that Vista might just deleted the data in the partition.

Thus, I used HirenBootCD to boot into dos programs and used FDISK to recreate the partition. It worked in the end.