ARGHH!!! HELP! Computer gone BAD :(

Guru · 1 Jul 2007 at 23:03

Ok, I don't know whats going on but basically I have an 80gig hdd and a 200gig one and today my computer went pooh and said something about hal.dll being missing. I read some fixes on the internet and have coppied hal.dll off my xp cd and put it on my system...

This got me bootable again, BUT ALL my hardware drivers re-installed when it booted, the gfx was in 640x480 and all my drivers had messed up.

I've reinstalled them all, BUT! Now BOTH my HDD's are showing as 76.3gig

and although I can still see the stuff on my 200gig drive, its mainly saying filesizes of 0 bytes.

Only twigged it was messed up when I went to watch a movie that's saved on the 200gig and it failed to open.

In the Bios the 200gig says:

200GB
65535
16
0
65534
255

Which afaik is what its always said.

Anyone please help me make it show 200 in windows and get me the 100+ gig of data I appear to have lost back

Cheers in advance,

G

/edit also Daemon tools just said invalid device everytime my pc boots now.

Guru · 1 Jul 2007 at 23:18

Also just went to shut it down. Normally it would just switch off. But this time it said:

It is now safe to turn off your computer

WTF!! Dunno what is going on but its doing my nut! :confused:

Guru · 2 Jul 2007 at 07:34

shokz said:
Also what Motherboard do you have?

My MOBO is a Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9 nForce4

Guru · 2 Jul 2007 at 20:20

doh! I went to reinstall windows and it showed c: drive d: drive and 112gig odd off unpartitioned space. Foolishly I clicked enter on it to check it out, and it had partitioned it making it a g: drive (e and f are dvd's).

Is there any way to make my d: drive back into the single 200gigs and KEEP the 112gig of data I seem to have lost?

Cheers,

G

Guru · 3 Jul 2007 at 17:04

please help

I dont know how to change the partitions back into 1 and restore the original file structure. I'm sure nothing has actually been deleted.

Anyone any ideas?

I've tried a program called partition doctor, but it didn't have the option to do what I needed.

Just to clarify, my C: drive which is phiysically one drive of 80gig appears to be fine now.

Some how my computer thinks my D: drive which is physically 200gig is 2 seperate drives, one is the same size as the C: drive and the other is the remaining 112gig now called G:.

I want the D: and the G: back into one 200gig partition with all the data restored.

Nothing has been formatted so the data should be there still, I do not think formatting my c: drive would work as it would still leave the D: and G: drives incorrect.

Cheers,

G

Guru · 3 Jul 2007 at 17:22

manic_man said:
i could be wrong but i dont think you can join partitions without loosing data on one of them as it would require at least one partition table to be deleted.

Personally id find a large external storage device and backup both partitions then start the whole thing again, removing all partitions and setting up a C and D during windows install.

The G: Drive thinks its empty, I dont mind deleting the table for that one as it shouldnt even have one. All I want to do is make the D: drive 200gig.

It's weird cause ALL the file names are still on the D: drive in the same structure as before, but most of the movies etc say 0 bytes so I can't back them up

Guru · 3 Jul 2007 at 20:28

Rroff said:
argh... don't give him advice on joining the patitons... or anything else that might write to the disc until hes tried to actually recover the data - anything else is likely to make sure its lost forever...

You need some decent diagnostic tools to try and recover the data from the drive to either repair the partition or recover the files to another disc...

hal.dll is part of the hardware abstract layer (generic software/hardware interface) and doesn't point to one specific fault... however it suddenly dissapearing might indicate that you have something really screwed with your disc controllers (are you overclocking?)

I'm not overclocking. I've copied the hal.dll from the xp cd to all my drives folling the advice I found by googling :/

Could this have cause the crazy disk mess up?

Also could you recommend some tools to use to help me please?

Guru · 3 Jul 2007 at 20:30

Amonlym said:
there are un-delete utilities that will restore (sometimes) from partition deletion...

id have advised jsut running windows scandisk on the drive frm another known good pc, had you not re-partitioned however

Aye fully gutted that the XP setup partitioned the drive, its mounted it but not formatted it.

So bizzare that both HDD's now show 76.3gig even though I know one's 200!! ARGGHHS!!!

Guru · 5 Jul 2007 at 20:41

ok, I've near enough given up on this ****. I've lost all my data and now that I've got my new HDD all the HDD's seem to be functioning ok.

Do you think it's worth making use of the warranty on the 200gig even though it seems ok now? Will they just send it back saying there is nothing wrong with it?

I have one month left on the warranty.