HD 1TB extended and ntfs partitions vanished

[jubatus]

For some unknown reason this 1TB HD stopped showing in windows xp. The drive shows everywhere else, bios, management, partition magic, test utils. Partition Magic is showing only the UNALLOCATED partition. AND says the drive size is only 31mb!! The EXTENDED and NTFS partitions have vanished. All other Utils are also showing 31mb. Have always had good AV. But I have a feeling this is a virus because iv had multiple HD problems of the same nature recently. But fixed those with a full partition remake. but this drive I cant loose the data. Yes I'm neglectful but have all ready bought 4TB of drives for backing up! Iv tried testdisk to no avail. IS reformatting and hoping to recover the data with a recover program my only hope? Because that sounds INSANE. Are there no programs that can simply restructure the drive to fix?

 

[fzabkar]

Your problem sounds like a Gigabyte BIOS bug.

See Q2 for an explanation and solution:
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/HDD_Capacity_FAQ.html

Please DON'T write on your drive while it is in a truncated state. Don't be tempted to use FIXMBR or FIXBOOT. These utilities will trash your file system.

 

[jubatus]

Awesome thank you. best lead Iv gotten!
Will update if I can get it fixed.