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IDE Drive recognized, but data and partition shown as a different drive

I have a new Western Digital IDE drive at 120gb. (WD1200BB) in a Windows 2000 server. I'll call it drive 2. I transferred some very important data to it. I then shut down the computer, put a drive 3 on the connector drive 2 was hooked up to. I rebooted the machine, and received 20+ "Did not safely remove hardware" messages. I cleared those, shut down the machine and put drive 2 back in it's original connector and put a drive 3 where drive 4 was all along. There's 4 drives total in the machine at a time.

When I received the drive I used the WD Data Lifeguard tool to format it. Now that I'm plugging drive 2 back into the computer it's coming up as one of the other drives, a 40GB drive. It shows drive 2 (120GB) as having only 40GB. And I can't retrieve the data.

I've just plugged drive 2 into an XP Professional machine and it shows it as unformatted with one partition of 37 GB and 70 or so GB of unpartitioned space.

Did I write to some allocation space when I tried to swap out the drives? I'm positive my data is there. I have not reformatted it. I just plugged it back in and 2 computers are not recognizing hte original, single, full partition and the data on it. There about 30GB that I'm desperate to have back.

Thank you, I appreciate any help. -goevan.

Luc Franken

Hi goevan,

that's a difficult situation you're in :(
Take a look at the list posted here: http:Q_20827883.html
I personally had good results with GetDataBack, but you might want to try the free tools first.

Greetings,

LucF

goevan

ASKER

Thank you. I believe it's the table of contents or allocation space that has been changed. I'll check this out.

Luc Franken

Good luck, and let me know how it goes.

SysExpert

Because you used an external tool to format, you may have serious issues.

I would try to put everything back the way it was, when it was working.

Also make sure that the BIOS is detecting the Drives correctly.

There is a known issues with Win2k shutting down, without flushing the hard drive cache.

Please run the windowsupdate and look for this.

The damage may not be easily fixable, but I would try my suggestions and also the repair options.

Do you have the data backed up on the original, since you said you copied data to this drive from elsewhere ?

I hope this helps !

goevan

ASKER

SysExpert,
I did put everything back the way it was as soon as I saw the problem. The BIOS is detecting the drives correctly, size and model#, cylinders, etc.

I did have disk caching enabled and that could very well be the problem. Unfortunately, I deleted the data from the original and formatted the original because I had verified the data on the new drive. Stupid.

Thanks for your suggestions.

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SysExpert

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goevan

ASKER

I looked at the Ontrack software. Do you think the $90 version would help in this situation? I will also ghost it. Thanks for that tip.

SOLUTION

Luc Franken

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goevan

ASKER

Then that's what I'll do. Thank you both. Can I split the points? You two have been invaluable.

Thanks,
goevan.

Luc Franken

Yes, you can split the points, just click "split points" just above the comment box. Then select one comment as an answer and fill in the amount of points you want to give each of us.

LucF

p.s. sorry for the late responce, I have been on a short holliday.