Stumped

[FireCat]

Greetings;

Just completed rebuilding the wife’s desk top, for the 3rd time in 8 years

Gigabyte GA7N400 Pro (R2)
AMD Athlon XP 3200+
Memory = (2) 1G ds (2) 512mb ss
600w PSU
74gb sata Channel 1 (XP pro OS with only MO2003, Norton 2009+Antivirus)
80gb IDE2 motherboard master (minor programs)
DVD/CD/RW IDE2 motherboard slave
floppy / multicard
200gb on IDE 1 PCI controller - cable select (storage only, basic)
200gb on IDE 1 PCI controller - cable select (storage only, basic)
Sound card

This system was running fine until two of the motherboard caps blew
I exchanged the MB with a spare GA7N400 Pro (R1)
Recall the only difference between the R1 and R2 is the addition of a CMOS jumper on the R2 boards, other then that, they are identical

The system was bench assembled and all worked well until I hooked up the two 200gb hdds
After posting to Verifying Pool Data, the post stuck on Non System Disk and would not boot
I disconnected the two 200Gb hdds and the system booted perfectly

Using an external usb enclosure, and after the system booted, the drives show up in Disk Management as unallocated, have strange names and the disk size varies each time they are disconnected and reconnected using the external enclosure

The pull down window in Disk Management only shows Properties and Help with New Partition blanked out

The wife is being very silent because she has tons of her data on the two drives and I can’t pull any of it off these two brats ...

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated !

 

[AidanJC]

Can you place the drives in a second computer to see if they will show up any differently?

Also, has the Disk Management assigned the two drives a drive letter?

 

[captjack5169]

Ok I would not plug the drives in again. Sounds like the partion tables are a mess and you risk the chance of damaging mission critical data everytime you plug them in. The best prg for this is get data back for ntfs. http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm. There are other ways to do it, but none as sure as this. The data is still there, just the tables are effed. Runing chkdsk on the drives will do more harm than good. You need to recover the data effectively so download the program or another like it turn the computers off, plug in one drive at a time and follow the instructions for drive use. Good luck.

 

[clarkjd]

You might check the HDD boot order in the BIOS, and make sure that the 2 data drives are not the first HDD in the Boot order priority. Some BIOS's allow selecting not only device priority(Floppy, CD/DVD, HDD) but Which HDD(if you have more than one) to boot from.

 

[FireCat]

Thanks for the responses

@clarkjd
The boot order is:
Floppy
SCSI (sata channel 1)
CD

The boot disk is a 10,000rpm WD Raptor on sata channel 1
The system boots perfectly when the drives on the PCI card are disconnected, and the drive on IDE 2 shows up in disk management, as well as he DVD/CD and the muticard readers in the floppy enclosure

@captjack5169
Discovered the usb hardware I was using to read the drives on the sister systems was faulty, thus the strange names
Got a new Rosewill enclosure and they read as Maxtor drives on the sister systems, show that they are the size they are supposed to be, but are still unallocated

@AidanJC
The two disks on the PCI card read as unallocated on the sister systems using a new usb enclosure

Oddly, folks, the 3 sisters are similar to this one, except the PCI or sata cards (non raid) have 4 higher capacity drives in lieu of 2, and I've never had this issue with their rebuilds
These machines are completely dismantled for deep cleaning about every 8-9 months and have been cleaned about seven times each with no issues, until now.

 

[FireCat]

@captjack5169

The 'GetDataBack' program worked
I can read the files now on a sister system through a usb enclosure
Will purchase the license in order to copy the files to another drive
(When the darling wife gets off the system long enough for me to perform that operation)

Thank you & the all respondents