Second harddrive cannot be read after installing Vista

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I have just installed Vista on my computer with success. But I have a second
harddrive (both are S-ATA) which I did not do anything to when installing
Vista. And now when I click on this drive, the D-drive, it says it needs to
be formated. And in diskmanager it says it is RAW!

What is this and how did it happen? Is this a major bug in the Vista
installation? Did it reformat my drive or can I get the data back?

Please help!!!

Thank you,
Michael
 
No, your drive has not been reformatted. Nor has the information likely been
lost (at this time). The partitions tables have gone missing so it appears
to the operating system as a new drive, without containing any partitions or
information.

I have been 100% successful in recovering data from such drives using Easy
Recovery professional. There is a special module within the program for
recovery from RAW disks - and it works.

The program is not inexpensive, but you get what you pay for. How much is
your data worth?

See here: www.ontrack.com

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!
 
Thanx Richard good to know that the data should be there.
So I assume that this is a bug in the Vista installation!
MS should pay for a version of Easy Recovery...Gosh look at those prices!!!

I will try to figure something out.

Thanx again :-)
Michael
 
I have just installed Vista on my computer with success. But I have a second
harddrive (both are S-ATA) which I did not do anything to when installing
Vista. And now when I click on this drive, the D-drive, it says it needs to
be formated. And in diskmanager it says it is RAW!

What is this and how did it happen? Is this a major bug in the Vista
installation? Did it reformat my drive or can I get the data back?
Click to expand...

Is the disk basic or dynamic?
 
Richard said:
No, your drive has not been reformatted. Nor has the information likely
been lost (at this time). The partitions tables have gone missing...
Click to expand...

Any idea how/why that might have happened?
 
I have no idea. It happened to me 4 years ago.

I was dual booting Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Each O/S was on it's own
partition on drive 1, and was hidden from the other operating system.

I had 4 hard drives in the computer. I was up in Win2K for a few hours and
decided to reboot into Windows XP. I initiated a shutdown. Everyone knows
that a normal shutdown takes a few seconds. This time the exit from Win2K
was instantaneous - less than a second. I knew immediately that something
had gone wrong. I rebooted into Windows XP and found that my 2nd, 3rd and
4th hard drive had gone RAW.

Anyway, using EasyRecovery Professional I was able to save everything, and I
do mean "everything", off of those three hard drives.

This has not happened to me since - even though I am running on the same
computer with the same basic hardware. So, I would not be able to claim a
hardware fault. I ran with Win2K and Windows XP for another 3 1/2 years
without any problem - so I can't say it was a system related condition. Is
there a virus, trojan or worm that can cause this? Who knows. But, I hope I
never experience the trauma again.


--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!
 
I wasn't even trying to do a dualboot. I was just upgrading my XP Pro using
the Vista install wizard. I made a clean install instead of making a real
upgrade where my settings are kept, so I really don't understand why this did
happen and I think that I will recommend everyone to unplug all other
harddrives when doing this upgrade. I guess it can't happen if you do that
and Vista will find your other harddrives when you plug them in later?!

But EasyRecover did the trick for me also! Just beware that you must use
another harddrive with enough space to recover the data to. It does not fix
the harddrive in a way so you just keep running like old times. You ave to
format the drive after recovering and move the data back!

Thanks for you help :-)
 
Glad you got it sorted Michael. BTW, EasyRecovery Professional has paid for
itself over the years. I have used it to recover files from many computers,
at a fee of course.

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!
 
I realise that this is an old topic, but I thought it worthwhile mentioning.
For this task at-least (lost partition table), there are other (~free)
alternatives to expensive software like the Easy Recovery series.

I don't know how much of a rap I'll get for suggesting this on these forums,
I was looking through previous posts trying to find an answer to my own
question (not posted yet, found this post in teh process also) and the last
guy who mentioned the 'L' word got a partial hosing, but I think he was a bit
more evangelical. I use both Linux and Windows machines. Linux as a server
for financial and security reasons, with Windows on my personal machine for
practical reasons.

If you look in these links, there are examples of people using free
(open-source) programs called 'gpart' and 'fixntfs' respectively to perform
similar tasks:
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/02/knpxhks_1.html

Yes, they're Linux apps. They can be run without installing anything through
Knoppix (basically, Linux on a bootable CD with remarkable hardware
detection). It's not EasyRecovery Professional for free, they're simple apps
that fix some problems, which is all you need in this case. The reason I
mention it is that the price tag is $499 cheaper. I respect the fact that
some people may be happier with the assurance of quality and support the big
price tag and name offers, but it's definately something to consider before
reformatting/repartitioning the drive.

The fixntfs app probably isn't going to be as honed as EasyRecovery
Professional. At that price I'd assume draws on semi-intelligent OS-centric
heuristics built-up from analysing countless disk failures, but it's an
interesting idea to run the apps in diagnostic mode and see if it thinks it
can fix the problem.

http://forums.techguy.org/windows-nt-2000-xp/454084-win-xp-will-not-boot.html
 
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