DDO - Uh Oh! Have I lost everything?

I was happily upgrading my p3 to p4, (with my 160gb Samsung harddrive, which of course needed a DDO to work on the p3).

So, I hooked it up to my new machine which reported that it couldn't find a driver that needed a DDO. I felt like such an idiot (remembering that P4 motherboards are okay with big drives), and so, I used the Samsung Ontrack disk and followed the instructions to remove the DDO.

Restarted with the hard drive in the new machine and nothing happened. I wondered if removing the DDO may have done something to the boot record, so I installed a new version of XP on another hard drive I've got kicking about, and attached the other harddrive as a slave.

XP is saying that the drive (with all my stuff on it and old install of both XP and win 98) isn't formatted. Needless to say, I had a lot of stuff on that drive I need to recover. Am I missing something, or is there a program which can read the info on the hard drive?

I can't see how you can lose so much info in the 2 seconds it took for the Samsung program to remove the DDO, so I figure it must still be on the drive, but removing the DDO has meant that windows can't read it.

Bear in mind, I'm a file recovery virgin so go easy on me...

 

By DDO, I'm assuming you mean disk drive overlay, which you needed to get around a BIOS limitation on your old mobo. The problem is, the DDO software was loading before your OS, pointing it towards where the OS thought the MBR & such was located on the HDD, while actually putting it god knows where. This is why XP now thinks your drive isn't formatted...filing system information isn't where it should be so it wants to format. The easiest thing to do might be to install the P3 mobo, reload the DDO & hopefully you'll be able to access your drive & back-up what you need, then do a full reload with the new mobo.

There might be third-party programs out there that can easily recover your stuff another way. I'll let someone who knows about them chime in on that.

There's a good source to read up on DDO here:

http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/bios/overDDO.html

 

Thanks for that - I did try to reinstall the (you were right, Disk Overlay) on the P3 but oddly it didn't give me the option....which is very peculiar.

I'm open to any suggestions..!