What the....??!!!

bennychico11

bennychico11

...
my personal computer (not an audio one) has been slowing down on me lately, starting up slow, hanging, etc.....so I decided to reformat and start from scratch. I have two internal IDE hard drives one 40GB and the other a Western Digital 120GB. I put all my personal files on the 120 and keeping the smaller one as the system. I decided to use this Windows SP2 version that's been sitting around not being used to install on the 40GB. Put it in, went through the whole setup procedure and MADE SURE that I choose to delete the two partitions on the C: only (one the system partition, and another a backup partition that for some reason was created awhile back when i reformated before). I did notice at the time that the 120GB drive was being recognized as a 35GB one....which confused me, but I didn't think too much about it.

Well...after formating everything and installing windows I noticed that Windows recognized my other drive but was still calling it a 35GB...but now it was also saying that it hasn't been formated and "would you like to format". Did I have a problem with the drive or is Windows XP SP2 in the habit of doing whatever the hell it wants to any and all drives?? Why is a 120 GB drive filled full of stuff, now being recognized as an empty, unpartitioned 35GB drive??

anyone else had issues like this??? this really pisses me off. I'm running VirtualLab Data Recovery Software and it looks like it's finding some if not all of my files...but the software is $100 to buy!
:mad: :(
 
What kind of computer is it?

Is it a custom/generic one?

Were you running any software that may have been affiliated with the western digital hard drive? (EZ-BIOS?)

Did you install the 120gb drve yourself or did it come with the puter?
 
seryozha said:
What kind of computer is it?

Is it a custom/generic one?

Were you running any software that may have been affiliated with the western digital hard drive? (EZ-BIOS?)

Did you install the 120gb drve yourself or did it come with the puter?
Click to expand...

the computer was custom built by a company called ABS several years ago. No other software with the hard drive was running and I installed the drive myself about a year and a half ago. I've reformatted the computer one other time since I installed the drive, and everything worked fine (that was with a SP1 disc)...I know it's probably has nothing to do with SP2, but I need to blame something!

I'd LIKE to recover the drive if possible...there's nothing life saving on the drive (maybe the cure for AIDS...but nothing really important I guess :p ), but there are several pictures of things I wish I could get back, music, etc. Sigh, maybe I should just spend the $150 to have it restored :(
It's just the weirdest thing though. :confused:
 
I would first make sure that your BIOS is recognizing the drive corectly.

If it isnt, go into the bios and have it autodetect the drive, see if it stays the same or changes.

You really shouldnt have to format it, but if it still isnt working, unplug the drive and start windows up, shut it down, then plug the drive back in and see if maybe windows didnt detect it properly the first time.

Just some ideas...
 
Sorta quick, sorta dirty.....

bennychico11 said:
my personal computer (not an audio one) has been slowing down on me lately, starting up slow, hanging, etc.....so I decided to reformat and start from scratch. I have two internal IDE hard drives one 40GB and the other a Western Digital 120GB. I put all my personal files on the 120 and keeping the smaller one as the system. I decided to use this Windows SP2 version that's been sitting around not being used to install on the 40GB. Put it in, went through the whole setup procedure and MADE SURE that I choose to delete the two partitions on the C: only (one the system partition, and another a backup partition that for some reason was created awhile back when i reformated before). I did notice at the time that the 120GB drive was being recognized as a 35GB one....which confused me, but I didn't think too much about it.

Well...after formating everything and installing windows I noticed that Windows recognized my other drive but was still calling it a 35GB...but now it was also saying that it hasn't been formated and "would you like to format". Did I have a problem with the drive or is Windows XP SP2 in the habit of doing whatever the hell it wants to any and all drives?? Why is a 120 GB drive filled full of stuff, now being recognized as an empty, unpartitioned 35GB drive??

anyone else had issues like this??? this really pisses me off. I'm running VirtualLab Data Recovery Software and it looks like it's finding some if not all of my files...but the software is $100 to buy!
:mad: :(
Click to expand...



You apparently installed it right the first time.

If the stuff is useful to you, take the drive out and see if you can put it in a friends system. (you may already know this) It should be jumpered to slave, that means that "usually" there are some little jumpers next to the ribbon connector, and the layouts are usually on top. Some come automatically jumpered to slave, some to "cs" which means cable select. If it is jumpered to cs I would change it to slave, which won't hurt your data, either way.

put it on another fairly new machine with ribbon cable not serial ATA and connect it to the ribbon connector the boot drive is on. Power up the system and see if it sees the drive, if so, see if you can call up any of your files, not just on the directory list, but see if you can open the file, or just copy it successfully.

with ide drives the drive jumpered to master controls both drives, two drives jumpered as master usually won't work but sometimes work with anomalies.

Drives with a master and cs on the same cable some times work, sometimes don't and sometimes it gets confused.

If you can see it on a friends machine, you might just want to copy the most important stuff to cd or dvd.

If this is not too late for you, and you want more ideas, pm me and I will try to help.

also the symantic web site under norton utilities used to have a problem solving checklist for disk problems. you might try there.

good luck....
 
thanks guys...
i tried all your suggestions but to no avail. plugged it in in my other computer and it was recognized in the BIOS and still showed up in windows as a blank 31.5GB drive (even though the product model in the BIOS and in a software utility calls it WD1200JB).

i've tried a bunch of trial versions of recovery programs but ended up going with McAfee. They don't offer a trial version, but they are a reputable company so I thought for $50 it might solve my problem....but it didn't work! It's the only program that looks like it doesn't!! ugh. The trial versions of other programs all look like they will work for me, but none of them seem to be able to recover the actual filenames with it so I opted to try McAfee. Surprisingly the company that actually powers their software, OnTrack, sells it's own version of a recovery program...and THEIR trial version off their own site seems to do better than McAfee. Tomorrow I'm going to call up McAfee and get my money back and probably go with one of these other programs.

this has been driving me absolutely CRAZY!
i just want my damn files!! grrrrrrr :mad:
 
It sounds like windows f-ed up the other drive, there used to be a program called norton disk doctor that would usually fix errors like this. Im not sure if they are still around though.

good luck!
 
seryozha said:
It sounds like windows f-ed up the other drive, there used to be a program called norton disk doctor that would usually fix errors like this. Im not sure if they are still around though.

good luck!
Click to expand...

yeah, i looked at Norton's first....but they didn't mention (at least anywhere that I read) about being able to recover formatted drives or fix partitions. They just talked about accidently deleted files...then I came across McAfee.

I don't know....while running these trial versions it does tell me that it can't read some of the clusters on the disk. of course, when I had McAfee run a chkdsk for me to see if there was any physical damage on the disk, it said it was fine. so who the hell knows. A virus, corrupt disk, Windows XP dickin' me over.....it could be anything.
sigh

thanks again. we'll find out tomorrow what I'll be able to do. I give up for tonite.
 
does not look good for the patient.......

bennychico11 said:
yeah, i looked at Norton's first....but they didn't mention (at least anywhere that I read) about being able to recover formatted drives or fix partitions. They just talked about accidently deleted files...then I came across McAfee.

I don't know....while running these trial versions it does tell me that it can't read some of the clusters on the disk. of course, when I had McAfee run a chkdsk for me to see if there was any physical damage on the disk, it said it was fine. so who the hell knows. A virus, corrupt disk, Windows XP dickin' me over.....it could be anything.
sigh

thanks again. we'll find out tomorrow what I'll be able to do. I give up for tonite.
Click to expand...


at some point I am afraid you are going to have to decide, how important and how much to spend.

There is probably a shareware or freeware sector editor availabe, you might try tucows.com and check their utilities listings. Might be some free disk fixers. The ones with the most cows are the most highly rated.

a sector editor will display the actual binary code that is on the disk, some will translate to hexidecimal and asci for you. in asci mode you may be able to recognize parts of some of your files(if they are text, probably won't work with wav files).

Most file systems used by MS will write the fat (file allocation tables) in two different locations on disk (think this is a problem they have seen before?)

most auto recovery programs will try to recover one of the directorys and fats. If they can't, eeeuuuwwww. The problem is that MS file systems, and unix/linux too for that matter, do not store files in one long string on the drive(usually, unless you just defragged). A file 28 sectors long may very well be in 28 different places on the disk. The last part of a sector lines up the jump to the next in the file, not usually the physically next space on the disk.

Needless to say, this makes recovery problematic in the best of circumstances. The good thing is that a fast reformat or a standerd delete only remove the protection from a sector, they don't write over it with blanks or zeros or ones. Your data may be there, but not economically recoverable.

O by the way, don't copy or write ANYTHING to that disk unless or until you have given up.

best of luck.

ps...
by saying all this stuff I don't mean to imply you don't know it allready, I just don't know what you know. It's a real pisser to have stuff you have worked so hard for to be smoked by the software of the richest man in the world.
 
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