Hard drive missing all partitions!!

Hi all,

Advice on the following hard drive / partition problem would be greatfully received!!

On booting my XP OS a second hard drive I use for storage (1x 200gb drive with 4x partitions for documents, music etc.) was missing. Using XP's computer management>storage tool this drive is listed and labelled as 'unallocated.' I have bought and have installed Active Partition Recovery and proceeded to scan this suppoedly 'unallocated' drive.

The quick scan revealed no partitions but a full scan of NTFS (the file system for all 4 partitions on the drive) revealed the 1st partition on the drive (30gb) as 'good' and recoverable... BUT it also found a duplicate of this partition (!?!)which it deemed to be 'very bad' and the other three partitions were not found at all!! I am hesitant to restore this 1st partition in case the other 3 are then rendered unrecoverable... Any advice on what to do?? I think it's probablty a MBR problem but I don't want to lose any of the partition data so I don't want to go hitting 'initialize disk' as XP seems to want me to!! Advice greatly received!!

confused

 

Depends on how important the data is too you?

Best suggestion is to obtain another hard drive(s) and image the partitions to it before you do anything else.

MG has several disk imaging progs and also some recovery stuff in the download section.

Studio T

 

Data = important. This drive was specifically used for backup purposes, my OS is fine because I have it on a physically different hard drive. At the moment the defective drive believes itself to be partition-less and ready to be formatted for use - eeek!!

I've just downloaded and installed Partition Data Recovery to see if the partition table is salvagable so I'll see how that goes...

From the looks of things and the age / use of the hard drive it is not a physcial problem...

confused

 

Just to keep you guys updated... all is back and 100% fixed now... zero thanks to those two recovery proggys tho!! It was a freeware one... http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk that saved everything in the end!! Phew!! Now... I don't want this to happen again, I have Acronis True Image to take care of my OS which I back-up onto another physical drive. Any recommendations for something I can boot from a CD-ROM and recover from??