strange problem after reconnecting my 300gb drive, advice needed.

jifster · 8 May 2006 at 03:03

Hey guys,

I have two drives in my machine and while I did a complete reinstall of win2k I unplugged the 2nd drive (sata WD 300gb) so there was less chance of something going wrong. When I connected it back up when windows was reinstalled and I had the new instalation running well it tells me I have a 120gb unformatted drive attached!!!! I can't believe this has happened as I have so much stuff on that drive.

The unplugging and reattaching was all done when the machine was off so i'm not sure what could have gone wrong unless it's a bios thing?

I've had a look under disk management and sure enough it displays one non active 120gb unformated drive. :confused:

I'm so unhappy, If anyone has any idea's please help.

Thanks,

Jifster

Memnoch · 8 May 2006 at 03:36

There is some very good data recovery software out there for a small price. Im almost 100% sure you will be able to recover your data, from what your system considers an unformatted drive. I seem to remember ontrack being a good piece of software.....

Dutch Guy · 8 May 2006 at 12:10

Does Windows recognise the full capacity of the drive or just 120Gb total space?

Maybe you need a update from the HD manufacturer so Windows can see the full capacity?

jifster · 9 May 2006 at 01:20

Hi, thanks for the info. Yes I realise I may have to resort to a data recovery program to rescue my stuff although this is going to be a very time consuming exercise with such a large disk and so many files. It does suprise me that a drive could be such an unstable way of keeping data if all I did was unplug it and then plug it back in later when I had re installed windows.

Dutch guy, thats a thought, perhaps something is missing in my re install, i'm sure I added all the drivers for the mobo etc.. i'll take another look at that.

All disk management is showing is 120gb unformatted as a whole disk.

I'm going to plan yet another external drive to the same capacity so I can keep a copy of the drives contents but so far my experiences with external hard drives and data loss errors when copying large files is not good. I'm not sure why externals do this and perhaps the badged ones don't do this and only the diy versions.

Dutch Guy · 9 May 2006 at 08:21

When I had a 160Gb Maxtor drive I needed to install SP1a and a utility from Maxtor to allow the full capacity of the drive.

There can also be a capacity limitation jumper on the harddisk.

jifster · 17 May 2006 at 16:18

It turned out I had not installed all the mobo drivers correctly. Good old user error. :rolleyes:

Just thought I would post this conclusion incase anyone has the same problem.