Hi All! I have what I think is a common problem but have not yet found a solution. I have added second hard drive that has critical data on it from another computer to my new computer. I installed XP on a FAT32 formatted boot drive on the new computer and the second drive was picked up, but I cannot view the data on the second drive i.e it is not visible in Explorer. In Device Manager the drive is there and in Computer management it also shows up but is displayed as 'unallocated'. The boot drive was originally formatted as FAT32 so I converted it to NTFS using Partition Magic but this still doesn't solve the problem. What's gone wrong? How can I get access to the data on the second drive? Any help would be gratefully appreciated! Thanks.
Right click on My Computer --->Manage --->Storage--->Disk Management. It should show up there, but my guess is that it doesn't have a drive letter. To convert to NTFS, you don't need Partition Magic (which I've found to be a piece of crap), you just would've needed to use the Convert NTFS [Drive letter]:\ command in XP.
I have used a disk recovery program to scan the disk and the data is there. The program tells me that it is an NTFS logical partition. Unfortunately I cannot use this program to recover the data as it is a trial version! The drive was originally in a machine that had XP and both boot and this second drive were formatted as NTFS. I thought it would be a simple matter of transfering this second disk over to an effectively identically configured new machine but this hasn't been the case! Someone has suggested recreating an identical user account on the new machine as I had on the old machine, presumably the idea is that this may be a security issue. I have yet to try this so I'll let you know if it works! Any further thoughts?
i doubt that it is a security issue try this program to try and recover your data: http://www.unistal.com/download_info.php?ddl=11 its a free program, and is very good. hope this helps.
Haven't used it myself, but it can't be any worse than Partition Crapic. I stopped using that a long time ago after it didn't correctly format partitions, and found out how I could do this with other, better, and free methods. One of the mods, Anti-Trend, had some link, but I can't seem to find it. It was a bootable .ISO image of a linux-based hard drive utility. I'm not sure if it can repair your damaged data or not, but that might be a solution.
Looks like the partition info is damaged, the data is intact. I wonder if I were to recreate the partition it would allow me access to the data. I deleted and recreated a boot partition using fdisk in DOS on my boot drive and surprisingly the data was still there and I could access it. As far as I can tell NTFS partition information takes up a fixed amount of space ending at sector 63 of a hard disk. My reasoning is that if I recreated the partition it shouldn't overwrite any data. What do you think?
Well, technically, yes, the data is still there. Formatting and other destructive disk changes basically make the system forget the data, which is why the government disassembles and then physically destroys decomissioned hard drives. However, I wouldn't go and recreate the partition, as that might make getting your data even harder. It can be recovered, but you might be looking at a data recovery service that costs upwords of $1,000 or more.
I could always try some cheap data recovery software which, of the trial ones I have tried seem to be able to see my data. I'm just reluctant to spend money on software that I thought would be freely available. I'd have thought there would have been at least something out there whether it be software or information that will allow you to recover data on a disk even if it meant doing it bit by bit! Ah well, I might just have to forgo my principles and bite the bullet on this one! ;o)
I'd send a message to Anti-Trend, as he might know of something that can help you out. I've tried looking, but I can't seem to find which one has that info.
