Corrupted hard drive

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I attached a 160GB drive, full of data, as a slave on a computer running XP
pro. I did not know that the computer didn't have 48 bit LBA enabled, which
limited the max drive size to 137GB. Now the drive/partition is not
accesssible by Windows. It says the file or directory is corrupted when I
try to access it in explorer. The physical drive shows up in bios, but
Windows reports it as a 127GB drive, with 22GB unallocated, and shows it as a
raw drive, rather than NTFS.

Is there any way to recover the data on this disk? Please tell me there is.
It is valuable data that I don't have backed up.
 
Eric said:
I attached a 160GB drive, full of data, as a slave on a computer running XP
pro. I did not know that the computer didn't have 48 bit LBA enabled, which
limited the max drive size to 137GB. Now the drive/partition is not
accesssible by Windows. It says the file or directory is corrupted when I
try to access it in explorer. The physical drive shows up in bios, but
Windows reports it as a 127GB drive, with 22GB unallocated, and shows it as a
raw drive, rather than NTFS.

Is there any way to recover the data on this disk? Please tell me there is.
It is valuable data that I don't have backed up.
Click to expand...

If nothing had been written to the hard drive or if it had not
been altered while as a slave in the XP computer, then put it
back into the original computer. If the original computer can
still see the hard drive, then make a backup of the data. After
all, that is the important thing to have.

If the original computer can no longer read the drive, then its
partition table has been corrupted. Again, if the data is very
valuable, locate and utilize a HD recovery outfit and be ready to
pay the money to recover the data. Otherwise, one could take the
chance and attempt a self-recovery. A Google search should turn
up some utilities. And there is always "fdisk /mbr".
 
The reason I took it out of the original computer was because the motherboard
went bad during a thunderstorm/power outage. I put the disk in another
machine to see if it had been damaged also.

I figured I would try chkdsk /mbr as a last resort when I was ready to give
up on getting the data back, but that won't fix a corrupted MFT will it?

As for the dual posting, I have never used these newsgroups before, and
after I posted my first message, I saw this group and thought the topic might
be more appropriate.
 
I attached a 160GB drive, full of data, as a slave on a computer running XP
pro. I did not know that the computer didn't have 48 bit LBA enabled, which
limited the max drive size to 137GB. Now the drive/partition is not
accesssible by Windows. It says the file or directory is corrupted when I
try to access it in explorer. The physical drive shows up in bios, but
Windows reports it as a 127GB drive, with 22GB unallocated, and shows it as a
raw drive, rather than NTFS.

Is there any way to recover the data on this disk? Please tell me there is.
It is valuable data that I don't have backed up.
Click to expand...

R-tools will probably get it back. I've pulled stuff off a drive with
a destroyed partition table with it before.
 
Eric Sank said:
The reason I took it out of the original computer was because the motherboard
went bad during a thunderstorm/power outage. I put the disk in another
machine to see if it had been damaged also.
Click to expand...

You'd still need to try to access it with a machine that has a BIOS that supports
48-bit LBA running XP SP2. Don't even mess around with the machine that
doesn't support it. Another option would be to install in onto a controller card
that supports 48-bit LBA.

It's also very important to know whether or not the original machine
had a drive overlay or Goback installed. Both of these will in effect hide your
partition tables from Windows unless thier respective loader code is running,
no matter how-many-bits LBA your BIOS/OS supports.
I figured I would try chkdsk /mbr as a last resort when I was ready to give
up on getting the data back, but that won't fix a corrupted MFT will it?
Click to expand...

No, don't run fdisk /mbr or chkdsk on it if you value your data.


The fact that Windows thinks it's raw is somewhat good. Otherwise chkdsk may
have tried to "fix" it.
 
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