[LordFett]

I was just moving everything from my Maxtor SATA drive to my WD IDE so I could put the SATA into my new computer and the WD just stopped. I copied about 150gb (250gb drive) and as the last files were coping I got an error saying it couldn't find the destination drive. I went into computer managment and it is there, but suddenly unformated. I deleted everything as I moved it off the SATA. How do I retreive my info from an unformated drive? (it is also now showing at a 167gb drive and not a 250gb)

[Blade_yaj]

you may have a driver issue. I've seen that before where something goes wrong your driver or in your bios and you see the hard drive less then what it is. I think the max that you can see without the driver would be like 120 beyond that you need to get drivers to control your hard drive or else it doesn't know all of it. If you get that to work then your data should show back up. If not you can get a program from download.com and it would read the hard drive and retrive your data for you.

[LordFett]

The thing is this happened WHILE I was copying data from one drive to the next. I've had the WD IDE in this pc before and when I first hooked it up tonight it was reading all 250gb. Freshly formated it and then started copying everything over. About 20 minutes in I get the windows message saying the drive isn't there anymore.

I took the drive out of the computer and have it on my IDE->USB cable and I can see all of it, but it is still unformated and I can't get to the info. Going to try it in this linux machine.

[LLXX]

Can you check with a disk editor to see if the partition table is still intact and also the partition bootsector?

This might be caused by a problem in the cabling.

This post has been edited by LLXX: 01 March 2006 - 02:45 AM

[LordFett]

I so far have been able to get most of the data back using file scavenger.

I'm just running out of room on the hard drive in that computer (80gb drive with only 40gb free space) and it doesn't have SATA so I can't hook up my 300gb to recover info to. Looks like I will have to do recovery in shifts. Fill up the 80gb, move it into the computer with SATA and copy onto the SATA then put the 80gb back into the recovery machine, rinse repeat.

And my wife says having 6 running computers was a waste.

[ripken204]

it may just be a bad drive, most bad drives fail within hours of first using them.

[LordFett]

ripken204, on Mar 1 2006, 05:17 PM, said:

it may just be a bad drive, most bad drives fail within hours of first using them.

This drive had been in use for a while, I had it been my main drive for a couple months before I got the SATA drive. I now have two computers and was hoping to put the WD IDE in one and the SATA in the other. I guess I need to run the WD utility on it to see if it finds any errors before I put it in my system.