Windows Computer help - Data ecovery help needed

I have a HUGE problem!

My computer has 2 hard drives, a 20Gb and an 80Gb. The 20Gb was the drive i used to install my software onto including windows. The 80Gb drive was used for storage as i have lots of music, movies and most importantly, animations i have created for university etc....

My problem started when i reformatted my 20Gb hard drive. I re-installed windows in an attempt to clear my computer of annoying pop ups and other problems I have lived with for too long. I never touched the 80Gb hard drive, but now things are back up and running I cannot get access to the 80Gb hard drive.

The drive is recognised by Windows, it knows it is there, and there is even the F:/ icon in 'My Computer' but when i click it I get an error message saying:

F:/ is not accessible.
The parameter is incorrect.


The data I have on the 80Gb has not been touched, it is still there on the drive, but I just cant get to it. There are a number of online Data recovery software packages which can be downloaded for free, and can be used to search the 80Gb drive (which i have done) and it tells me everything it can find, which is everything that was on the drive before, noting is missing as far as i can see.

The problem with the data recovery software is that, to actually recover the files you have to upgrade to the full versions, which costs a packet. The cheapest i can find to do the job is £120 which i cannot afford.

Does anyone know what i can do. Any computer whiz know what my problem is and how to fix it. Or does anyone have an Data recovery software they can lend me or copy for me, I will of course pay for the trouble. I really am in a pickle cos i need the data, and im flat broke.

Please help, I am desperate

 

http://download.pcinspector.de/pci_filerecovery.exe

Ive used that before worked for alot of stuff I lost.
Its free I think, worth a go.

 

I had to do this a while back with my 250Gb drive. Happened when I installed WinXP and couldn't be bothered to install SP1. The partition was created under SP1, and XP obviously has the partition size limit Pre-SP1.

Use ontrack easy recovery pro 6.0 to do a raw recovery of your drive.
http://www.ontrack.com/

 

Need a little more info.

What version of windows are we talking about? Are you using the same version this time around?

Did you physically add, move, or change either drive durring this maintenance?

Was the 80 Gig drive formatted NTFS or FAT32?

Do you have another drive available to transfer recovered data to (should it be needed)?

 

Sorry.

It was windows XP before, and i re-formatted with XP again but a different one from the first time as i lost my original disk. Dunno if that makes a difference.

never moved, added, removed any drive during the whole process.

I am not sure if the 80 gig drive was formatted NTFS or FAT32 because my local store put the drive in for me as i am not hardware inclined, im a software man. This store has now closed hence my posting here.

i dont have anothewr drive to transfer to. I am hoping i can pick what i want to recover, as i only need about 10 gig of files off the 80 gig drive which i can put onto my 20 Gb drive and re-format the 80Gb drive, the rest of the data on the 80 gig drive is not important

I will look into the data recovery software you recommend.

thanks

marc

 

Another possibility for you is to look at is http://www.windowsubcd.com/

I'm still playing with it myself.. but it has some VERY interesting possibilities.


In your case I'm thinking along the lines of simply booting with the CD and being able to drag and drop the files in question.

 

Have you tried getting Knoppix and booting into your system that way?

Sam

 

all i have tried so far is unplugging the power from the drive and booting up again, then replugging the drive and re booting. All that did, was replace the error message in my original post with:

The disk is not formatted, do you want to format now?

Apart from that, i havent tried anything. Im am not confident enough with a computer to try anything, thats why i am asking here for some help because my hardware knowledge is none existant. I was just hoping someone would know what my problem was and describe an easy fix for me.