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athlon_xp_prob

asked on

problems with WD HDD (:panic:)

after fixing the cpu cooling problem i am in a much more stressing situation...
whatz the problem ? ->
after installing new hardware (new hdd also) , i installed win XP on the new hdd
...and after configuring & stuff i decided to plug in my old hdd (WD 10 GB) via serial ATA which i never used before :o)

so i setted up everything like it supposed to be (serial ata connector to hdd,, power also, bla bla)
and... booted up,, disk is found by RAID controler, BUT there is no trace of it in the win explorer...
so i looked up control panel - admin tools - computer managment - storage - disk managment
and then i saw a terrifying scene...
under my new hdd there was my old hdd shown like this :

Disk 1
Unknown
9,55 GB
Not Initialized

on the right it says : "Unallocated"

i was shocked, terrifyed, paranoid,,
EVERYTHING i have ever collected, photos of friends, stuff,, bla bla ,, gone ?! no no, thatz not acceptable

so i figured, i must get rid of the paranoia :))
so i unplugged the new HDD , and plugged in only the old one
and what happend ?
1. CMOS reset ?!?!??!?!
2. in the part of booting where hdd needs to be booted up it just stops

so now, i am desperate, and writing this msg around expert forums in hope someone will have some creazy idea that could help
plz help people, 6 years of work is on that HDD, i CANT lose it

-> thnx to everyone for reading this
Avatar of zzconsumer
zzconsumer

At first I feel forced to tell you what I tell anyone: Make frequent backups. HDDs can get broken at any time, and most times they get broken when you really need them. For this purpose, a CD-RW is suitable in most cases. A better solution is, e.g. a DDS type streamer. Have a look at Ebay for this.

Since the problem already occured, we need to find a solution.

There are several (very, very expensive) data recovery tools available, such as Ontrack's easy recovery. (http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecovery) You can use this to get a chace to recover your data in case you accidentally killed your partitions.

Anyway, did you allow Windows XP to write an initial ID to the disk? If not, I'm not sure how Windows handles HDD without the ID. If you are not sure, don't write anything to the disk. Any writing access lowers your chances to ever recover your data.

Have you tried re-attaching the disk to the standard IDE Controller? Try that out, I had the problem of a stopping system at bootup using a 30 GB HDD at an Ultra ATA Controller.

Let a manufacturer's disk fitness test (non-destructive) check your disk. Maybe there's other errors. You should find that on the manufacturer's homepage.
What file system was on the old drive?

First thing I would be doing is connecting the drive to a suitable system on the secondary IDE and see what happens.

I don't know a lot about RAID controllers, but would have thought it a risky idea to be connecting drives to them that had important data already on them.

Have you run any kind of configuration on the RAID controller? if you have  it's very likely it's removed the existing partition(s), this is what RAID controllers do. In order for the OS to see the RAID set as one logical drive you have to start from scratch; removing all partitions in the process. If this has happened you're looking at a data recovery service such as OnTrack.

Before you lose all hope however, I'd suggest connecting the drive to a standard IDE controller.
Avatar of athlon_xp_prob

ASKER

well.. after some days of exploring i solved it

first i got Partition Magic 7.0, and it didnt work
then i got Lost & Found,, and it found all 3 partitions (on old HDD), but it couldnt be restored, bcz it has problems with NTFS,, and finnaly, and luckly, i got soft named "PC Inspector File Recovery" and it solved it all in a matter of mins.
really impressing for such small software, graphix are good too...

so if anybody with similar problem is reading this now, get the before mentioned software, and your problems are gone :)

thnx to you all for sugestions,,
problem - solved
----------------
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SpazMODic

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