After reading the "Lost for good?" Thread, still feel compelled to ask. First, the situation.
I have a Maxtor 250 GB PATA drive that was a secondary drive for about a year old, and currently is an external drive, now for about 2 days. about 6 hours ago I got an error saying that both paritions in this drive have become corrupted and I should run chkdisk. I tell the system to schedule a check for both of them next time I restart my computer. so, about 15 minutes ago I restarted my computer, and low and behold, chkdisk didn't start. I figured that was odd so I checked My computer to see if they were there. nope. I then checked the Logical Disk Manager, and I suddenly have 232 GB of unallocated space. Considering that this drive is about 65% full in total, and a lot of it has not been backed up yet (I pulled it out of a dead machine to start backing up), its rather important to me.
So, any ideas, free/inexpensive recovery programs, or tricks of the trade?
edit: Playing the part of a newbie I just realized there is a giant thread of links above with plenty of diagnostic and recovery tools. I'll keep them in mind but would still like suggestions to going about fixing this.
I have a Maxtor 250 GB PATA drive that was a secondary drive for about a year old, and currently is an external drive, now for about 2 days. about 6 hours ago I got an error saying that both paritions in this drive have become corrupted and I should run chkdisk. I tell the system to schedule a check for both of them next time I restart my computer. so, about 15 minutes ago I restarted my computer, and low and behold, chkdisk didn't start. I figured that was odd so I checked My computer to see if they were there. nope. I then checked the Logical Disk Manager, and I suddenly have 232 GB of unallocated space. Considering that this drive is about 65% full in total, and a lot of it has not been backed up yet (I pulled it out of a dead machine to start backing up), its rather important to me.
So, any ideas, free/inexpensive recovery programs, or tricks of the trade?
edit: Playing the part of a newbie I just realized there is a giant thread of links above with plenty of diagnostic and recovery tools. I'll keep them in mind but would still like suggestions to going about fixing this.