Partition Recovery?

[Equinox]

Hi! I will try to make this short, I recently got a new motherboard,
and got a separate new hard drive to do a clean installation of
windows xp on. So after installing the new motherboard, I connected
the new HDD [3GB] to the computer as primary master, and connected my
old one [120GB] as primary slave. I loaded a winxp installation disk,
formatted the new 3GB HDD and did a new clean install of winxp. After
doing that, when i started the computer with the new winxp, I couldnt
really see all my older drives from my 120GB HDD. The motherboard was
detecting it right, but windows and any other software that i tried
[MaxBlast5, GetDataBack, TestDisk, Seagate File Recovery, etc] could
not correctly read the partitions. Before i replaced the motherboard,
there were 4 drives of approximately 30GB each. Now i see only one
drive from the 120GB HDD, and even that is inaccessible. It says
"drive not formatted, do you want to format it now?". I somehow
recovered the data back from that one drive, which turned out to be my
old C: drive, by GetDataBack, but i got alot of other stuff on my
other partitions as well. I don't really understand the problem. Do i
need to do a partition recovery? or Partition table recovery? or
Rebuild Partition Table? Please help!

more info about this incident can be found at my thread on the
hardware analysis forum:
http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/69673/

[ignore my last post there, i posted it during recovering my stuff
from the old C: drive. At that time i didnt know that i wouldnt be
able to retreive the data from getdataback from the other drives.]

Also i know that the partitions are still intact, cuz i tried
repairing windows xp on my old HDD, and during that it showed me all
my old partitions and showed that all the data is still there.

Thanks in advance!

[GDH]

Hi,

I follow your situation, but I am not sure exactly what you are trying to achieve at the end of the day? Were you happy with the data that you recovered? or are you still missing some? Are you trying to repair the drive as apposed to starting fresh by formatting it and copying the recovered data back onto it?

[Equinox]

Well, in an ideal situation. I would like to continue working windows from my old 120GB HDD, exactly like i was using before. But since that isnt possible. So i wanna retreive as much data as i can, so that when i do a new windows xp installation, it won't take me ages to get back to the same state as it was before the accident. The thing is that i heavily customize my windows. With themes and desktop widgets and docks and IMs, and a buncha software, cuz i multitask alot. So starting from a clean winxp will take atleast a week just to get somewhere around the feel of how it used to be.

Good thing is, i found out what was the problem, was fairly simple problem, the 120GB as Primary slave was not being recognized at its full capacity by the new motherboard. When i changed it back to Primary Master, and booted from MaxBlast5, it showed me that i could back up all the partitions. Problem with that is, that either i backup the entire 120GB HDD exactly as it is, including partitions and everything, OR, i can make "image backups" of selected partitions. Im not sure exactly how either of them are gonna work, but it sounds kinda weird, and the image files are supposed to be .tib extensioned. Never heard of that before.

So now im looking for some software/disc to boot from, which will easily let me transfer my data, as folders or even files, to my external HDD. Preferably i would really like if i could find a bootable version of GetDAtaBack. Any advice will be appreciated.

PS. I'm not that good with linux, so recommending live cds might not be a good idea. I have ubuntu drapper and knoppix, whoppix/slax live discs, but i know i'll be lost working with them.