My problem.... :lol:

1st HD: 40GB with XP
2nd HD: 250GB just data

I have a second hard drive(250gigs) installed in my machine basically for data storage, songs etc. Yesterday I tried to install another operating system (Linux) on the larger one. There was an error and seemingly the larger hard drive (I called it F) is now missing from My Computer.

The BIOS is recognizing it. Secondary Drive is 250GB ATA... comes up. Disk Management comes up as shown in the pic attached. I wish to know, is there a way I can get the machine to recognize again. Also, do you think the data is accessible?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Marauder,

looks like the drive only actually formatted out the first 125GB and you have a leftover partition of a hundred and change. whether that 125 GB is your Linux partition or not is unknown but you could probably format the leftover portion as a third drive label. I do see the
250 GB drive.. its just in two pieces. 125 & 107 with a whopping 17 gig of overhead missing.

It was formatted before and I had data on it. I wanted to split it so I could have Linux on one part and whatever on the other. That 125GB was the Linux partition but I deleted it.

If I format the 'New Volume' area it will erase the data on it. Is there any way I can get that back?

Thats tough.

It isnt recognized as NTFS or anything and the the original disk label
and file allocation table (or the like) has more than likely been scrubbed..
not the best deal. so while the data is still there more than likely the thing
that tells it where its at isnt.

I would see if I could mount the "unallocated" via knoppix and see what i could see..
http://www.knoppix.com bootable linux from a cd, always a must have

you may be able to find a disk recovery utility that might help you find what
you have lost on the net somewhere


good luck

cain

First of all, Thanks for taking the time to reply to me Cain.

I'm going to forget about Linux for a while and stick with IE. The task is, now, to see if I can recover anything from that disk. If not I will format it....

I had over 1,000 songs and videos on that not to mention many games and programs stored there.

Just a suggestion (maybe help): that partition of 125G - try to convert it to FAT32 (it seems to be NTFS) (usually I use Partition Magic for this kind of problems).
The rest of 107 gb, they seem to be "unallocated", and I doubt you can convert the partition to a known format; but still you can get the info on it (long and hard way): format the partition (recommended FAT), and try RuntimeGetDataBack (I used it, and it works good for data recovery)

Hello,

Sorry to dig this topic back up but i felt it was important to reply to a couple messages from people who seemed to have similar problems and were outlining the same symtoms.

I had the exact same problem as you and i found that my problem was related to NORTON GOBACK. this software is POS. essentially. If you were running NORTON GOBACK on your system then reinstall it and your drive may re-appear. I found that norton goback appends its self to all mounted hard drives and locks them if there is no association to norton goback available. I was able to retrieve my information, then i uninstalled the horrible software. I hope this helps you or anyone else searching google for answers.

I have the same problem, but I doubt it can be fixed: I installed RedHat 9 on my 2nd HD and because it isn't a Windows-formatted HD, then it cannot be visible in my computer without *tada* LTOOLS (free).