Hard Drive has no files

I was installing an additional secondary hard drive in my daughters computer. After the computer booted, I right clicked on My Computer and selected manage. From there, I select Disk Management. I selected the secondary drive and formated it. I KNOW I selected the secondary drive because it is 30GB nd the primary was only 7GB. But after it formated the drive, I rebooted, and received the message that there was no operating system. I took the primary drive out and put it on my computer to see what it had. It shows the drive as 7GB with only 1GB free. But when I double click it, I only see one file, AUTOEXEC.EXE and it is 0KB. ALL the files are GONE!! What can I do? Is there ANYTHING I can do? Is there a utility that might help me?

thanks
ray

 

Might be worth a quick try to unplug(power and data cable) of new secondary drive and put the primary back in your daughters computer to see what happens. Basically put things back the way they were to be sure the 7GB drive is missing files and it is not a jumper problem or anything.

 

It could be that somehow the partition got set to inactive so it's being seen incorrectly. Use a hard drive tool to view the status of the partition (you can use FDISK from Microsoft: just use option 4 ONLY to display drive information.) A great hard drive tool is 'Boot It NG (Next Generation)'. You may just have to turn the partition back 'on'. BUT- playing with partitions can be dangerous!!! I assume no responsibility if you accidently lose your data!! So, be careful, please!!!!