HD Problem

Computer Forum Storage Devices
1

First my PC specs:

Q6600 stock
2 gigs pny ram
8800gt 512 mb evga
500gb Western Digital HD

The power went out at my house, when it came back on, I went to reboot my PC since it had been shut off from the abrubt power outage, and I got an error involving the boot sector or w/e.

I inserted the windows cd, tried to repair c: and even “fixed” the boot sector but then I got a disk error.

I checked to make sure all HD connections were right etc, everything was fine.

I restarted and kept getting the error.

Oh well I needed a format anyways…so I formatted, or I thought I did.

I inserted the windows cd, formatted c: (approx 250 gigs I think it was) and when it rebooted to continue installation after the format, it said there was an error or had not enough disk space to continue installation.

So I formatted it again.

Didn’t work

So I went into the recovery console, format C:\ 'ed it.

Didn’t work again.

I did figure it out however when I actually had to delete the original partition…

So windows installs…great.

The good? Windows installed.
The bad?

I no longer have my D: drive which was my backup and around ~200 gigs of music/movies/files.

My C: drive only registers as 130 gigs.

thoughts?

2

So, you Deleted the C partition and then put a new partition in the unpartitioned space, put windows there and now you wanna know if you can get the D partition back? because if you deleted both partitions then it won’t be that easy, obviously

3

Yes, I agree, will be difficult if you formatted the “whole” HD (both C & D partitions).
May be able to recover if you only did a “quick” format so wouldn’t overwrite data on HD just resetup your MBR and FAT (or whatever NTFS drives use to index file locations, …) if you haven’t overwritten the data. BUT it would be very painful as you can no longer directly access the tables that knew what was where. So you’ll have try to use some type of Data recovery software that will hunt for these old Fats & MBRs and files, … Very time and labor intensive, usually quite slow as well.
Sometimes it’s just not worth the effort, especially if you have a fairly plain vanilla, fairly sparse use of HD. In my case with thousands of programs of which a lot are old legacy ones from DOS, W311 & W95 days, many of which require custom Shortcut setups, … it can be worth it.

regards,
Chuck Hanlon

4

do you mean 137GB ?