Hi everyone, I was up until 5 am last night banging my head against the wall so I really hope someone can help!! My PC was experiencing quite a few problems with a year old XP installation so I decided to do a reinstall 2 days ago. I have 2 drives, 80gb(boot) and 250GB (data) (both SATA), I backed up all my important stuff to the data drive, booted my XP disc, wiped the boot drive and away I went. The XP disc is an old, but proper one, that didn't have either service pack on. I ran through all the reinstall bits and bobs, had a small problem with corrupting downloads that turned out to be Nvidia firewall, got everything patched and all ok but the data drive appears corrupted, it appears in 'my computer' but clicking on it gives me "F:| s not accessable, The file or directory os corrupted and unreadable". Disc management in admin tools shows up a drive, as healthy, with a size of 232.88 GB, and as active. I wondered if it was to do with the 48bit LBA addressing or anything else? It was so late last night I wasn't able to fix things and after running into a few things on the web, I physically unplugged the data drive and did the whole windows installation all over again but to absolutely no joy. Has anyone else had a similar problem? Is there anything I can do? I need the data on this drive more than the PC itself!! Thanks very very much for anything you can give - you lot have proved very very knowledgable in the past!! Cheers again
You need SP1 or SP2 installed to see disks larger than 137gb don't you, so have you installed either of the service packs?
What file system is the 250GB drive? You could try installing a copy of Linux/Unix, that'll tell you if the data's still there, then you could copy it to another drive/burn it to DVD's. It'd take ages, but at least you've got your data back that way. Try using it on a different computer, if you can.
arrgh! it was a c&p error! but, thanks for the catch! http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=133948 try that one instead.
Hi everyone, thanks for all the info, I don't think my case is quite like the other forum link however - I just can't access the drive at all - it does appear but tells me it is corrupted. I have looked ata few file restore tools and they do see my old files so they are definately still there. However I think my problem is probably that either the master boot record or the table of contents has been damaged / deleted. I have another discussion of this very problem here: http://www.techsupportforum.com/microsoft-support/windows-xp-support/159260-windows-xp-resinstall-large-hd-disaster.html Now I am getting really really desperate - can anyone think of any way I can get this drive up and running again - I don't have 250GB spare anywahere to drag the file sout, reformat and replace!! thanks very very very much Tets
right one last pleasr and I promise to bugger off I bought the proper version of Active Partition Recovery (APR) because I am so damn desperate and tried to rewrite the MBR on the drive, I can still see the files on the disc throgh APR. No Joy :'( Now all I get when I try to access the drive is: "G:\ is not accessible. The parametre is incorrect" Disk manager sees the drive but says it is RAW, even though it is marked as healthy and active. I will worship you as a god if you know what to do now..... Any file recovery tools I can use? I'll plug in a load of crappy old small drives if I have to!! cheers again Tets
Just create 2 partitions, one for Windows (25GB) and the rest for you and application. That is what I have and it's great when it comes to backup your documents and such. You can either just drag and drop under the other drive, or simply set that your folders to an other drive. And also it prevents you from accidentally loosing saved games and downloaded game maps (like for WCIII)
Can't you copy the files off a bit at a time and say burn them to DVD or even borrow a friends USB drive to copy them too?
