Unallocated BS

[John_Ryan07]

I unplugged my external maxtor 250gb hd using usb2 to reinstall windows 2000 pro. I unplug my external hd all the time though so this shouldn't be the answer to the prob im about to describe..
I plug my baby back in and it shows that its a "mass storage drive" and that junk. I go to "my computer" but my E: drive is missing. I look around and find it to be labelled as "Unallocated"! I dont know how to get it to work, is there something i can do myself or should i invest some money in a data recovery program? My whole life is on that 250gb hd and it was completely full :[ ugh, its so depressing. Any help would be greatly appreciated. thanks!

 

[Mr5oh]

Partition Tables may be messed up. There are programs to fix this. I wouldn't do anything with the drive until you get the data off it though. Is it NTFS, or FAT32?

I've used R-Studio in the past for data recovery, and it works very well (Has always been able to recover 100% of my data).

PCI_FileRecovery is free, and works well with FAT32 drives, may try it out first as it is free.

My Desktop: <A HREF="http://Mr5oh.tripod.com/pc.html" target="_new">http://Mr5oh.tripod.com/pc.html</A>

 

[John_Ryan07]

i use NTSF, sorry i forgot to mention that. I guess i'll invest in a data recovery proggy, prolly the same one you used... I guess this could be worse :-/ thanks for the reply

 

[Mr5oh]

Yeah, I was working on my father-in-laws computer, and swapped motherboards in it, so he could have a dual channel motherboard. Well going from the MSI board, to a Gigabyte, between the new hardware and old drives, the partition information wasn't useable on his backup drive.

I tried just about every program I could find, most allowed a free demo but wouldn't actually allow to recover anything. Many were more than I wanted to pay. In the end I found the best one, was R-Studio, they have a version that is just for NTFS, as the whole entire suite is rather exspensive, but I belive the version just for NTFS is $45. Not bad for data recovery, I guess.

My Desktop: <A HREF="http://Mr5oh.tripod.com/pc.html" target="_new">http://Mr5oh.tripod.com/pc.html</A>

 

[John_Ryan07]

thanks i found a website selling for 45 bucks. But it says that this version only revovers files under 64kb in size, is that true? my hd consists of mostly movies so if thats true i think i'll have to opt for something else. thanks again

 

[sjonnie]

First thing I would try is running Active Partition Recovery to restore the Partition Table. It should be able to find the deleted partition, rewite the table and then your drive should work like before. Messing with the partition table won't do anything to your data so there is no risk of loosing data if it doesn't work. Unless you have 250GB of spare drive space file recovery software isn't going to help you anyway.

<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/myanandtech.html?member=114979" target="_new">My PCs</A>

 

[Mr5oh]

I believe the demo only allows you to recover under 64kb. I recovered, over a 1 gig of backup files, with my copy.

As mentioned above, have you tried re-writing the parition tables yet?

My Desktop: <A HREF="http://Mr5oh.tripod.com/pc.html" target="_new">http://Mr5oh.tripod.com/pc.html</A>

 

[John_Ryan07]

i DLed a demo of the partion table re-writer and it seemed a bit buggy, so i'll dl it again or something, but also i have absolutely no experience with this so it seems a bit hard to figure out. Does anyone know of an easier program i could use? thanks a bunch for all the help though :]