Guest jneg123 Posted July 28, 2003 Report Share Posted July 28, 2003 Thanks for all your suggestions so far. Unfortunately, I still haven't been able to gain access to the data on the 80gig primary drive. I have gone ahead and reinstalled WinXP HE on the 4gig hard drive that Mandrake was installed to. I have made this drive the master and reset the jumpers on the 80gig drive to make it the slave drive. My BIOS detects both drives and correctly identifies the 4gig as master and the 80gig as slave. However, when I get into WinXP, windows explorer only shows the new drive and the cd drive as entries in My Computer. The original drive is not listed. When I go into the device manager, the 80gig drive is listed under disk drives. Any ideas as to what's going on, or what I should try next? Thanks for your continued support. Joe Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
static Posted July 28, 2003 Report Share Posted July 28, 2003 Did you read this How to Dual Boot? It might contain something helpful! ;) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest jneg123 Posted July 28, 2003 Report Share Posted July 28, 2003 In trying to diagnose hdd problems I came across Gibson Research Company (grc.com) and their SpinRite 5 product. They told me that their product only deals with lower-level read-write hardware type problems. They directed me to data recovery software that try to rebuild FAT and partition table information. Their three suggestions were: "EasyRecovery", manufactured by Ontrack Data International http://www.ontrack.com "GetDataBack" manufactured by Runtime Software LLC http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm "Do It Yourself DataRecovery" web site http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/. Of course, for liability reasons, they also made it clear they don't endorse or specifically recommend any of them. Does anyone use such software or heard of it? Have any of you heard of these particular recommendations before? Any other options out there you may have heard of? Thanks, Joe Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scoopy Posted July 28, 2003 Report Share Posted July 28, 2003 windows explorer only shows the new drive and the cd drive as entries in My Computer. The original drive is not listed This sounds like you need to assign a drive letter to it. If XP is like win2k, right click on my computer and select manage. Disk management should be an option there where you will be able to fix this (as admin). I had previously used powerquest's lost and found to recover data from a bad partition. Looking here, http://www.powerquest.com/products/discontinued.cfm I see it is now discontinued. You may still be able to find it tho. (Wondering now... what is the legalities of software such as this? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest jneg123 Posted July 30, 2003 Report Share Posted July 30, 2003 Final Update Finally able to rescue my data! :D After several days of trying everything that was suggested, and anything else I could think of, I came across http://www.partition-recovery.com. They have this DOS based program that rebuilds f'd-up partition tables and MBR. I spoke to the tech support guys and they said it actually writes to the drive new partition info that should resurrect the drive. I wasn't feeling brave enough to have it write to the drive and potentially overwrite or destroy the data I needed to recover, so they pointed me to http://www.file-recovery.net. There I found a Windows based program that ONLY reads from the messed up drive and lets you copy what it finds to a new hdd or removable media. SO, I bought a new drive, installed WinXP on it, installed the messed up drive as a slave drive, and was able to copy the data from it to my new drive! I was very impressed and happy. Anyways, thanks to all who offered there assistance and knowledge. I'm sure I'll be back once I sort out my windows system and am ready to try dual-booting with MDK 9.1 again. Also, if anyone finds themselves in a similar situation and would like more detail on what I did, don't hesitate to ask. Joe Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SoulSe Posted July 31, 2003 Report Share Posted July 31, 2003 HELP! Mdk 9.1 hosed my WinXP partition Congratulations! Most of us had to get rid of it ourselves. :P Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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