Can my data be recovered?

[ragnarok83]

Hello,

I recently purchased a new parts for a computer and built it from scratch. The only parts that I did not purchase were the hard drives. I have 3 hard drives:

1. a 400 gig seagate sata(This is where I have the operating system installed, xp home)
2. a 250 gig seagate sata
3. a 1 terabyte western digital

All these drives had been formatted and have been running fine on my old computer.

After I built my new machine I added the 3 hard drives and went to boot up. I went into the bios and checked to make sure all 3 of them were recognized, and they were. I changed the boot priority to the exact same setup as my old one and was able to load up windows without any problems at all.

The problem comes when I go to "my computer" and check out the setup. The 400 gig and the 250 gig seagate drives show up but the 1 terabyte drive does not show up in "my computer." I went into device manager. The 1 terabyte drive did show up in device manger as well. I checked out to see if there was any issue there. It said that the device was working properly when I went into the properties of the hard drive.

I then went into disk management to check that out as well. Under this location it said that the disk was unreadable. Also I noticed that it was listed as a dynamic disk while the other drives were listed as basic disks. I dont know if that makes a difference or not.

I have critical information dealing with my work that is saved under this drive so reformatting is not an option. If it is a worst case scenario is there some type of way I can retrieve the data and then reformat?

Just a head's up, I have xp pro.

[GDH]

Hi,

You should be able to recover all the data from the drive. Do NOT format it, or change it in any way.

Download Recover My Files from Data Recovery Software to Undelete Files; Disk recovery; Recover Deleted Files, install it on your C: drive, and first try a "Fast Format Recover" search on the "physical" hard drive. I expect this will find all the files.

If it does not, next try a "Complete Format Recover", searching only for the pre-selected file types. When the OS Items number in the progress window gets to a high number (each one represents a file), stops increasing rapidly, and remains constant, stop the search and allow the search results to rebuild (you do not have to scan until the end of the drive as with a 1tb this will take ages).

When you click on the files in the search results screen, you should be able to preview them. If you find them, you can purchase a key and save them to another drive.

Please let us know how it goes.

[ragnarok83]

Just to give you an update. I ran the fast one and it picked up what seemed like all my files, which is almost a miracle considering what I have gone through to try and restore them. There were many files that I had on that hard drive and since I wasnt sure if all had been recovered, I ran the complete scan next.

I just bought a 1 TB external hard drive so my question is, would I be better off saving the results from both the quick scan and the complete scan?

"stop the search and allow the search results to rebuild (you do not have to scan until the end of the drive as with a 1tb this will take ages)." -- GDH

I am a little lost what you mean by letting it rebuild. It rebuilds after I hit stop scan?

[GDH]

Hi,

In the search results screen, click on the files found and make sure you can preview them - i.e. see the pictures and read the documents - this is the best way to make sure that the search has been successful.

When I say "rebuild", I mean that Recover My Files goes through a process where it 'builds' the file and folder structure to display it in the results screen.

If you run the Fast Search and have found all the files that you need - and are confident that you are not missing any - then you do not need to run a second type of search.

[ragnarok83]

One of the things I noticed are that many of my files are larger than they originally were. For example I have a video that was originally around 700 mb and now is being listed at 1.2 gig. I am not sure how that happened.

Also now that my data is saved to an external hard drive, is it ok now to change the disk from dynamic to basic in disk managment( the one that is messed up i mean)? Will that format that disk?