60G hard drive only shows 1.99G

one918 · May 7th, 2004, 10:07 PM

So, I put in a new Mobo (Abit AN7) and everything seems to be ok, except for 2 things. I have 2 drives, C and D. After I installed the mobo and formatted the C, the D only shows 1.99G and its a 60G hard drive. Oh yeah, and somehow, when I formatted the C, all my data was lost from the D

I checked bios, jumper setting, etc. cant figure it out for the life of me.. :

Any help would be appreaciated greatly

. I've spent the last 2 days with hardly any sleep trying to figure this thing out and it's killin' me...

osprey4 · May 7th, 2004, 10:11 PM

Based on your post, you do seem a bit short on sleep.

Seriously, though, what's your OS? You didn't do anything like partition the drive with FDISK, did you? I'm wondering if your BIOS is seeing the drive correctly.

Edited by EvilRick

one918 · May 7th, 2004, 10:21 PM

Running Windows Xp Pro, but it did have the same prob. with 98SE. Nope, didn't partition the drive w/fdisc either

John Prophet · May 7th, 2004, 11:07 PM

so you have lost all the data already?

may as well run fdisk and start from scratch with the partition..or do it from disk management or whatever

osprey4 · May 8th, 2004, 08:17 AM

I'm not sure you have lost your data yet. I'd pull the D drive out, make sure you've got XP working properly, then pop the drive back in and see what you can see.

one918 · May 9th, 2004, 01:35 AM

Ok, windows is working fine on my C, which shows fat32, D still shows 1.99, and fat. What to do now?? What is fdisc, is it reformat? Cause I've done that, and it just formats the 1.99G

John Prophet · May 9th, 2004, 01:48 AM

fdisk is not the same as formatting...fdisk puts the "partition" on the hard drive...then u format the partition.

if u run fdisk on the d drive you need to first delete the partition that is on it...the 1.99g partition

then make another partition and choose "y" when it asks if u want to use the maximum size etc

----

normally fdisk has 4 options..but if u have 2 hard drives it will have 5 options....the extra option is for selecting which hard drive you are fdisking....so make sure you are selecting the D drive

lots of primers on google on how to use fdisk

one918 · May 9th, 2004, 02:19 AM

Great, thnx. Also, I found another thread on disc management. Found that there was 56G unallocated on a 2nd partition. I deleted the 1.99G partition, now it is just 56G and says its healty.

When I try to double click to open the D drive, it says it hasnt been formatted yet. I dont want to format it yet though, I still want to find out if my data is still on it.

Is this scenario better or worse, than I was before...??

sechs · May 9th, 2004, 01:39 PM

You'll need to use a third-party utility to recover the files. Most cost.

In the future, don't bother using DOS tools which may mangle your disk. Just partition and format in the Windows disk manager.

Xaotic · May 10th, 2004, 05:10 AM

Try this utility:

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm

It is freeware and will run within the Windows GUI. It is capabile of recovering data form nonmechanically damaged drives. You will need space to recover the saved files into. I've used this utility to recover information from damaged partitions, partially overwritten partitions, and unmountable volumes(including those that Windows wanted to write a signiture on to enable the mount process).