HD - 32gb pin select calamity

[dettol]

Hello kind citizens of the internetz!

I ran into your small corner of the net by reading this thread:

.techspot.com/vb/topic9980.html

...which related directly to the absolutely stupid thing I have done.

I am a noob.

My power supply recently decided to die and so I thought it was a good opportunity to shift to a higher volume HD and perform some house keeping. The original HD I am referring to is an 80gb Hitachi Deskstar with the following pin options:

hitachigst.com/hdd/support/7k80/7k80jum.htm

For some reason, only known to God, or maybe Satan, I chose the 32gb pin option when assigning my Hitachi as the 'Master' drive in order to begin transfering data to my new 250gb 'Slave' drive. This instantly reduced my drives capacity from 80gb to 32gb... Eat you heart out Jenny Craig!!

The problem, and what I would like to ask your help with is the following...
The 80gb drive was not blank, it infact was full of my personal files! Music, images, videos, games, documents, EVERYTHING!! I now have approx 45gb of unalocated drive space which is in fact full of information!!

Can you please advise me of what the best course of action is to recover this information? Is there a quick fix whereby I can reattach this allocated space without formating it? I would be eternally greatfull for your assistance

Thank you in advance!

dettol

 

[kimsland]

Normally doing this, would not affect your data from returning to the proper jumper position.

You can try ZAR to recover your files : http://www.z-a-recovery.com/unformat-tutorial.htm

There are many other data recovery programs H E R E.

Note:

This is by plugging in the drive as Slave of course

 

[dettol]

Thank you for your prompt reply kimsland!

I will look into these links and post back!

 

[dettol]

Hello again,

I have now had a chance to look into this further. I have read up a little more about my issue and have looked into the links you posted.

Heres something that I think has complicated my situation.

When I originally booted up my computer, after setting the incorrect pin configuration, Scandisk went to work truncating every file it found was in the then inaccesible area of my drive which comprises 45gb. After finishing this it said there was not enough room to save the changes and proceded to boot into Windows.

I have now found 2 folders in the root directory of what is left of the partition in question (D:\) which contain 20thousand 'FILExxxx.CHK' files.

Here is a screenshot of the Disk Mangment Screen in Windows Computer Managment:

http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/1417/computermanagmentlq6.jpg

Normally I would be brave enough to go out and fix things myself through trawling the web but in this case I feel well out of my depth and would very much appreciate someone giving me some hands on coaching on what route to take.

Look forward to a reply!

 

[kimsland]

which contain 20thousand 'FILExxxx.CHK' files

That's a tad annoying !
Not only has Scandisk destroyed every file (just about) it has also decided to fill your HardDrive to the limit, with junk.

Well, in actual fact I've had this issue before as well. I'd say most techs have.
It is possible to recover your old data, but time consuming to do.

I'd say delete all the *.chk files (that'll take a while on it's own)
Then use the recovery tools above to scan the drive (ideally set it not to recover chk files)

Personally, I think they're gone. Once I scanned for 3 days (straight) trying to recover stuff like this, and then after actually finding data files, they were then to be found corrupt anyway (ie wouldn't open, or just had gibblygob in them) I think I recovered about 1%

I believe your HardDrive may be faulty itself as well (there is that possibility)
It's up to you