Crashed: 2 different Hard drives with same partition/data errors. Data recoverable?

[comattack]

Recently my computer just crashed.
Been having isses with the CPU/MB heating up a bit (even with new fans), and computer would randomly shut off.

Well, one day when I went to boot up, it would not read my SATA hard drive, nor boot the OS from my IDE hard drive. Said something to the the effect of "BIOS not installed" in broken english. So I figured the MB/CPU finally went out (which I had planned on upgrading anyway)

Just bought new MB/CPU/Memory (using onboard video & sound, so no peripherals added) and hoped it would just boot up from my current OS installation. No such luck....

I have a 320GB IDE drive (that contains my OS)
and a 500GB SATA drive, that I use as my "back-up" and for saving all my documents, media files, etc.

Longer story short... I poped in my Win XP CD, to check my OS installation, and it shows BOTH hard drives only having a partiton of 131XXX MB (131-ish GB). All "free" space too... The rest being unallocated space.... WTF?!? I didn't format, delete files or anything...

Both Hard drives?!? This has got to be more than just sheer coincidence! So I double checked it... hooked up my 500GB SATA drive to another working computer, and went into Disk Management and it shows one partition of 131XXX MB and the rest being unalloated. Funny thing is, that is shows 0 bytes used, 0 bytes free under "My Computer/Explorer".

Basically the probelm is the same with both, and I don't wnt to completely wipe both hard drives if I can manage to recover data on my 500GB drive (the only one I care about, has all my files... the 320GB doesn't have anything I can't replace or reinstall).

So why would both just randomly decide ro "repartition" itself to 131GB and the rest unallocated?!? Any way to reactivate the "unalloccated" space and recover whatever data SHOULD be there?!?

[comattack]

I think I might have to check into this a bit more, but I think what I am seeing in windows setup has to do with the version disk I have (WinXP Home SP1), so it won't see the full size of the disks. The Computer I checked it on, is not a very well maintained one, and probably only has SP1 as well.

However, the version of XP I had installed on the 320GB hard drive was SP3.
I have the SP3 upgrade burned to a CD. I might have to update the other computer and THEN check my drive again...

BUT... if SP3 is already installed on the 320GB, why wouldn't it just boot, and why would it only show 131GB in setup?
I don't understand why the disk would be fault yin the first place...

If I hook up the SATA (500GB) drive to an updated XP installation (SP2/SP3) should I then be able to read the data from the entire drive?

Have a copy of Vista Ultimate on it's way... maybe that will solve my troubles (or add more... I donno...)

[Big_Daddy]

Boot up a Linux distro and see what you have. I keep a CD copy of Knoppix for this reason