Hard drive recovery

[Gaidal]

Ok guys here's the deal. I recently purchased the following components for an upgrade:

AMD Athlon XP 2400+
Epox 8rda+ nforce2 MB
120 GB Maxtor HD (ATA 133)
512 PC2700 DDR RAM

My plan was that I would take the old components out of my computer, swap these in, and do a fresh install of XP. Then I was going to plug in my old drive and transfer all the files I wanted. I had a 40 GB Maxtor that was a few years old, still in good shape though. I had the old drive split into two 20 GB FAT32 partitions.

Needless to say, the transfer didn't go smoothly. I couldn't get XP to recognize the drive as anything but an unallocated partition. If I tried to assign the drive a letter, it would say that it needed to reformat the drive. I thought for a few weeks I basically just lost all of my data and made an effort to recover some of my mp3's and such.

Fast forward to yesterday, I was bored and was tinkering with data recovery programs. I found one called Stellar Phoenix and gave it a whirl. Well, guess what, it found ALL the data on one partition of the 40 GB drive! I feel sure that with a little tinkering, I can get the contents of the other drive to display as well.

My problem is that Stellar Phoenix is a $100 program. Since there's nothing PHYSICALLY wrong with the drive, I guess I've come to the conclusion that I'm missing something and can probably get the data off without the help of a program designed for pulling data off of damaged drives. This is where you guys come in. *g* I suspect that the problem is that the drive was split into two partitions and I'm trying to display the drive as one partition. Would a partitioning program help me? If not, what would?

[woodbutcher]

Was your old drive partitioned with NTFS and the new drive with FAT 32?

WB

[Gaidal]

No, the old drive was partitioned FAT32 and the new drive is NTFS.

[Target]

You said you tried to put both drives into the newly configured system right (old and new) in an effort to copy over files from the old drive?

And you also stated that you installed the new drive first and loaded winXP right?

My guess is that the reason you are having issues with winXP seeing the old drive partitions and transferring over your files, is that in effect what you have installed are two physical drives, each with an "active" partition. You can/should only have one active partition per hard disk in your system, regardless of how many drives there are.

What I would do, is this (assuming you don't want to use the old drive as well as the new one going forward):

Install the new 120gb drive and partition it the way you want it using a dos boot disk and fdisk, or the disk utilities contained on the manufacturers diskette (ie: Powermax for Maxtor, etc).

Then install the old disk as well, and boot from DOS diskette. Using either the disk utilities contained on the diskette from the manufacturer, or an imaging program like ghost, and copy the partions from the old drive to the new one. The fact that the partitions are different sizes should not be an issue, as long as the partition on the new drive is larger than or equal to what you are trying to transfer from the old drive.

Once the partition/data transfer is complete from the old drive to the new one, power down and disconnect the old drive.

Boot up using only the new hard disk. You old data should now be contained on the partitions of your new drive.

Now I would simply install winXP over the old Operating system on your C: drive contained on the 120gb disk.

[nodnerb2]

Hi,

Target you have said in your post that

Quote:

You can/should only have one active partition in your system, regardless of how many drives there are.

I have a system here that has two drives each with it's own OS , One has Win 98 SE and the other has Win ME. Each of these drives has an active partition. I set up the one I want in the BIOS and away it goes. If I am running the 98 System I can read from and write to the other one no probs and vicea versa.

Cheers

Nodnerb2

[Gaidal]

Well, the problem is that Windows or Norton Ghost or DOS refuses to see that there are ANY partitions on the old drive. It's just... there as a big unallocated drive. I tried what you said anyway and Ghost just has that drive grayed out so that I can't select it.

[Wizzard~Of~Ozz]

Have you tried booting with the old drive and a 98 bootdisk? Can it see the drives? if no, then try "Fdisk /MBR", can it see the drives after a reboot after doing that?

[Target]

Hey nodnerb2....thanks for catching that! Forget 3 little words (per hard disk) and the entire meaning is lost <lol>.

See what distractions do when you are trying to type a reply

I have edited my original post to:

"You can/should only have one active partition per hard disk in your system, regardless of how many drives there are."



After re-reading this thread, and thinking about it some more, I think maybe Wizzard~Of~Ozz has hit upon the best place to start.

[nodnerb2]

Hi,

No Probs Target.

I am planning on adding 2 more HDD's to the machine one with XP and the other with 2K.

Does it make any difference having NTFS and FAT 32 Drives in the same machine?

What I'm thinking is the NTFS Drives will be able to see each other and like wise with the FAT 32 Drives or am I way off base?

Cheers

Nodnerb2

[Target]

My understanding is that both WinXP and Win2K are able to read NTFS and FAT32 partitions.

Those OS's should be able to read: NTFS5, NTFS, FAT32, and FAT16.

The differences between NTFS and FAT32 drives in the same system really boil down to: Max File Size, Max Clusters Number, Unicode File Names, System Records Mirror, Boot Sector Location, File Attributes, Alternate Streams, Compression, Object Permissions, Built-In Security, Recoverability, Performance, Disk Space Economy, and Fault Tolerance.

Here is a really good table that should lay it all out for you:

http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_vs_fat.htm