Just lost two IDE Primary and Seconday partitions to SATA - Help - Please - Urgent

Dear All,

I am new here, just logged in, because I am sweating now, and I need deperate help.

Here is the config for my sys: AMD Athlon 2800+ on a Asus K8V-X MoBo. I owned 40GB and 20GB Seagate PATA. The 20 was my primary master.

I bought a Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 160GB SATA a few days ago and have been trying to install it. I have it successfully setup as my primary now, and the Win XP Sp2 is setup up here. (while setup, I had disconnected my other 2 IDEs)

So, then I decided to connect them and transfer all the data to the SATA, since I want to get rid of the IDE HDDs.

I connect the 20GB, while bootup, it takes some extra time than usual. Once XP is loaded and running, I open explorer and theres no 20gb HDD at all! Upon further investigation, it tells me that the 20GB is an 'unpartitioned space' !!! I rushed to my friends PC and there, Win as well as Linux tell me its unpartitioned!!

Holy god! And the same thing with my 40GB too! I don't understand it! Now I'm in deep trouble. Both my HDDs are 'unpartitioned' and I have all the data I have been working on for years on them!

Please please help me. I want to recover my data back as well as understand why this is happening.

Thanking you in anticipation,

Warm Regards,
Rahul Sangole.

Welcome to the world of SATA and RAID.

If your hard drives were configured for RAID - normally, I would say reinstall every thing the way you used to have it. BUT, since there is no backup of your data, well, you live and learn. In a RAID configuration - if one hard drive goes down (basically speaking) all RAID drives go down. That's why I mentioned putting every thing back as it was.

Contact ASUS tech support - this is your best bet for SAFEMODE DATA RECOVERY in a RAID system.

FireDoc

Dear All,

I was able to recover my 40GB IDE using a software called Partition Table Doctor. It was simply a matter of seconds and my drive was up and running. I dont understand what it did or how, but I'm glad. Now I'll try it on the 20GB IDE.

Warm Regards,
Rahul

Good Going!!!! Data recovery - always a good thing.

I would suggest you go through your motherboard documentation very carefully and go online an learn about RAID, which is used on SATA motherboard compatible drives. Simply speaking, RAID combines all drives as one. You data is recoverable, but OS, partition tables, MBR and the such may not be.

Learn how to either remove the RAID system from drives with existing OS and data.

OR

Get a good Drive backup program. This would backup Drive C operating system and system settings and all the rest. Remember RAID will be all drives.

Another idea. Do not mix IDE with SATA. Windows XP is stupid in this regard and most of the time will place the IDE as primary over the SATA - and will rename drive letters.

Good luck

FireDoc

Well you probably payed for the partition doctor =(.

I found a free utility

It is called Testdisk and you can get it from http://www.cgsecurity.org/index.html?testdisk.html

It works not only for Windows NTFS partitions but also for Freebsd and other linux partitions

I have successfuly recovered FreeBSD as well as a couple of NTFS partitions.

so maybe if someone else stumbles over this. Try Testdisk. It does it over a couple of seconds too just like the doctor =D.

Hi Acoroain

Went to the cgi site by clicking your link. Couldn't find TestDisk. Would you mind leading me to it's place of hiding? ThanX

FireDoc

sorry about that the TESTDISK is actually here http://www.cgsecurity.org/index.html?testdisk.html

I usually find it through google =D