XP killed my harddrive

  • Thread starter Thread starter Arron
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Arron

I installed windows XP home edition onto a 10gb NTFS harddrive on a computer
with an existing 120gb FAT32 drive almost full with data. Everything went
smooth and worked great for about a month. I tried taking an 80gb FAT32 drive
almost full of data and adding it to my computer changing the positions
around on the cables.

Upon the first boot after the new harddrive was added Windows XP appears to
have done something to both of my fat32 drives and now they show nothing but
gobly gook, I can't access my files. Just random characters show up. It looks
as if XP wrote new file allocation tables to the drives or screwed up the
MBR's all in one motion. The drives still show under properties as FAT32, and
the correct used size and free space show up, but everything is gibberish.
WHAT HAPPENED? I put everything back to normal and my 80gb drive back in my
old comptuer but the drives are still messed up. I tried a system restore to
no success. One of the drives I ran scandisk and it said there were 2 copies
of the file allocation table that do not match and when it tried to fix it,
the problem just looks worse. I downloaded Getdataback and it only recovered
30% of the files it appears with the shareware version.

Can anyone explain to me why windows xp decided to screw up the harddrive
structures? And the best solution to at least recovering as much data as I
can? Is there a way to view the 2 copies of the file allocation table and try
changing them to primary position without deleting them? Could something else
be fixed that was messed up? Is file recovery software my best bet?
I would really appreciate any help recovering my data, and am greatly
disturbed by this fact of windows xp. Thanks.
 
Arron said:
I installed windows XP home edition onto a 10gb NTFS harddrive on a
computer with an existing 120gb FAT32 drive almost full with data.
Everything went smooth and worked great for about a month. I tried
taking an 80gb FAT32 drive almost full of data and adding it to my
computer changing the positions around on the cables.

Upon the first boot after the new harddrive was added Windows XP
appears to have done something to both of my fat32 drives and now
they show nothing but gobly gook, I can't access my files. Just
random characters show up. It looks as if XP wrote new file
allocation tables to the drives or screwed up the MBR's all in one
motion. The drives still show under properties as FAT32, and the
correct used size and free space show up, but everything is
gibberish. WHAT HAPPENED? I put everything back to normal and my
80gb drive back in my old comptuer but the drives are still messed
up. I tried a system restore to no success. One of the drives I ran
scandisk and it said there were 2 copies of the file allocation
table that do not match and when it tried to fix it, the problem
just looks worse. I downloaded Getdataback and it only recovered
30% of the files it appears with the shareware version.

Can anyone explain to me why windows xp decided to screw up the
harddrive structures? And the best solution to at least recovering
as much data as I can? Is there a way to view the 2 copies of the
file allocation table and try changing them to primary position
without deleting them? Could something else be fixed that was
messed up? Is file recovery software my best bet?
I would really appreciate any help recovering my data, and am
greatly disturbed by this fact of windows xp. Thanks.

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