Lost Hard Disk Contents

[DreamMaker]

First I'd like to say hello to all at TechSpot. HELLO.

I accidentally applied the following command at a system restore command prompt to a secondary hard disk: "D:\boot\bootsect /nt60 c:" (without the quote marks). I thought it was my DVD drive.

Now when windows boots up and I try to access the drive in Explore, Windows asks me to format the drive. When I right click properties, it doesn't show any sizes and it shows the pie graph as 100% free space.

Is there any command I can enter to reverse the above? Is there a specific switch I can use in the command that pertains to hard disks?

Any help will be greatly appreciated,

Thanks

 

[Nodsu]

Hum.. Why would a hard disk utility do anything with your DVD drive? Or were you just trying random commands?

What Windows versions are we talking about here? WIndows XP and earlier do not support Vista partitioning or boot sectors. So if the Windows that cannot acces the drive is XP, then you have to revert the boot sector back to the older format. (Use the /nt52 switch).

 

[DreamMaker]

Nodsu, thanks for the reply.

I was using a Vista Ultimate (64-bit) installation disk and following Microsoft's instructions (which are wrong by the way) to manually re-install windows.old (32-bit).

If I re-apply the command using the /nt52 switch, will I regain the contents of the drive? This time I will be using an Ultimate 32-bit install disk.

Thanks so much.

 

[DreamMaker]

Oh, one more thing, this might be important.

The hard disk was a secondary disk I pulled off my WindowsXP machine. So it was originally formatted using XP.

 

[Nodsu]

Will you get your data back? I have no idea But the /nt52 switch does the opposite of the /nt60 one.