Currently trying to recover a drive that worked until it mysteriously stopped working this morning. This isn't straight drive failure...the drive spins up and the system can see it, but it no longer sees it as containing all the data it had yesterday..or even the filesystem.

The 250GB drive was formatted into one NTFS partition in a XP system, and has been working fine since it was installed several weeks ago. Now it reads as unformatted, empty space. I know this can't possibly be the case...the data written to it yesterday can't have been removed overnight, but somehow the filesystem itself got hosed. At least that's my theory.

So I was fishing around on the machine and I realized the BIOS wasn't seeing the drive at it's natural size. I figure this could be a good indicator of what the problem could have been. I've since updated the version of the BIOS, and voila it sees the drive at it's full capacity. It doesn't see the filesystem or data it used to have, however.

Unfortunately this drive has a huge amount of important, irreplaceable data that wasn't backed up to anything (as this particular machine didn't have any way to back up such a large amount of data). I'd really like to be able to get it back.

Perhaps it's just been addressing the blocks on the HD improperly all this time, and after it gets to a certain point..just craps out? I'm looking for a way to piece the data back together. Right now I'm using a program called Ontrack EasyRecovery and running it's RawRecovery feature to look for files. It says it's finding stuff (over 11k files so far) but zero directories, and none of the filenames it's displaying are files I had on the disk (must be making up it's own new names for anything it pieces together). If this tool actually works (and I'm not sure it will), it seems likely that it's going to stuff all the files it recovers into one directory with arbitrary filenames. That's...kind of a pain. Of course, I won't know what will happen when it's done scanning...it's been going for nearly two hours, and the est. time remaining is over 23 hours (and increases as much as it decreases...like the tide)

Anyone have any tips/suggestions/recommendations?

If the BIOS never saw the drive's full capacity to begin with, then did the drive contain a boot-loader BIOS extender? Maybe that's what's missing.

What size hard drive did the BIOS see it as before you upgraded? I'm guessing around 127gb. If so, what happened is the OS finally trampled over that boundry enough, and probably wrote data to a critical area of the drive accidently, like the partition table area. If it did this, it may be recoverable by using a tool to rebuild the partition table manually, without blanking out the drive. I'm not sure if recreating the partitions in FDISK or silmiar will be good enough, and this is assuming the partition stuff is the issue anyhow.

The recovery utility running now, is that writing it back to the drive, or to another drive? If it's writing it to the same drive, other recovery methods may fail, as it could be trampling over needed recovery information.

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If the BIOS never saw the drive's full capacity to begin with, then did the drive contain a boot-loader BIOS extender? Maybe that's what's missing.

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Whu...I don't know that. AAAAHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhggggghhhh

/me flips through the air, into abyss

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What size hard drive did the BIOS see it as before you upgraded? I'm guessing around 127gb. If so, what happened is the OS finally trampled over that boundry enough, and probably wrote data to a critical area of the drive accidently, like the partition table area

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It was 137GB. What you're describing sounds along the lines of what I figured happened. Do you know of such a tool for rebuilding NTFS partition tables manually? I suppose I'll have to track one down.

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The recovery utility running now, is that writing it back to the drive, or to another drive?

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Well right now it's doing neither. It's the freeware version of the tool that just scans and tells you what it *could* restore if using the full version. The full version would restore to a different drive, because obviously it would be silly to restore to the same.

Thanks.

About a month ago WinXP would not start one of my harddrives. It was strange I could see the drive twice in the Disk manager. One had no partition setup and the other was the one that had been formated. I ended up getting R-Studio 2.0 from http://www.r-studio.com/ and recovered every single file.

Oh it runs in windows instead of a boot disk and will let you restore to a local or network drive.

I've used r-studio too, worked for me