Lost Partition on 300gig maxtor

[Cowboy kid]

I lost the partition (I think) on my 300 gig Maxtor Sata drive.
How can I get my data back?

I did a search already, I am new here, probably been asked 100 times, sorry to be 101 but I not found the answer yet though I am looking.

To explain in detail so no guessing what I've done.

I was using this 300 gig Sata as a boot drive with XP64 bit. (I can't install some old stuff in this)
I wanted XP32 BIT on another drive. (for those old programs)
I removed the 300gig Sata and installed an IDE drive and onto the IDE I installed the XP32bit, it was an old CD not sure if SP1 even.
All was fine, XP32 booted on the IDE drive. I shut down the system, installed the 300gig Sata.
Booted into XP32, used Win Explorer to access the 300gig Sata and got a message drive not formatted! Of course I did not format it!

I shut down and removed the IDE drive and tried to boot from the 300gig Sata. My system showed the drive during boot but hung at "Verifying DMI"

I put the drive into another system running Sata drives, says not formatted there also. I have ran Spinrite level 2 on the drive (hope I did it correct) as far as I know it only had the very last block marked with an R for recovered.

Now I still cannot boot from this 300 gig Maxtor sata, Bios shows it durring boot, hangs at Verifying DMI still. The drive is running and I can feel it get a bit warm, no odd noises.
When I boot into XP32bit (installed SP2 now) now on either system this drive shows as E: and not formatted. Properties says 0 space used 0 available.
Going to drive management this drive now shows as E: 128GIG healthy active and 151gig not allocated!

I would like to get the data restored or saved onto another drive.
I don't know what happened! I never had any trouble with this drive until this.

Yes, I know make lots of backups, I normally do, not sure what all was on this drive though not backed up yet. Since I was just playing with XP64bit so far I hadn't done too much new to be stored on this drive. Not sure if I had any previous data on it or what it was I might need. Also I used a speech to text program and script writing tool program and in a few days I wrote more than half a movie script in detail. I started that script just playing around so I hadn't backed it up yet!
It was turning out great though needs refined of course, I could never do that rough draft that good from scratch again!
That script and some 3d images I made I need most, and everything else I can get back also of course.

If it helps the system board is a Gigabyte board pretty new, bought earlier this year. Not certain what model off hand.

[oracleguy]

Go to Maxtor's site and download their diagnostics program and run it. It is possible you damaged the drive when you removed it or reinstalled it. If that is the case, recovering the data is going to be very difficult. Otherwise you might be able to use one of those partition recovery programs. Though it doesn't sound like a software caused problem to me.

Also did you install your SATA drivers in Windows 32-bit? Also double check your BIOS settings too, for good measure. If there is anything for 48-bit LBA, make sure it is enabled.

[Cowboy kid]

My 300 gig Maxtor is now bootable back into XP64 again!

I would seem that when I installed an OLD XP disk on another drive it did not have service packs! OLD XP with no service pack apparently did not support drives over 128gig or so nor 48bit LBA.
So when I connected my 300gig Maxtor of course MICROSOFT did what it does best, it screwed something up!!!
Instead of just giving an error message or such it broke my partition and set it as a 128gig with 131gig not allocated and thus all my data was gone and the problem!

I DO NOT want to sound like I am advertising them or spamming a thread, etc.., but the fact is I am very happy to get this fixed!
I fixed this now with iRecover and DiskPatch from
http://www.diydatarecovery.com/

First Irecover found my lost files. I restored many of them to another drive, but I did not have space available for 190gigs of data so I just got all I really needed! All the files I checked worked fine.

DiskPatch then fixed my partition MS screwed up!
Restored the Master Boot Record
Set Partition Active

Now I have booted back into this drive and everything seems to work fine.
I am one VERY HAPPY person!

Soon as I can buy another drive I will do a full backup of this Maxtor 300 gigs data, reformat and re-install. Probably install WIN7 on this drive anyway later.

[Fumigator]

Wow, good info, thanks. It's always a feeling of dread in the pit of the stomach when a hard drive fails.

My advice to you... partition your drives in such a way that stuff you actually create (documents, spreadsheets, program code, webpages, graphic files) and config files for your critical systems are all on a separate partition. Back this entier partition up every week or even every day. The amount of space that these types of files consume is extremely low compared to storage solutions available today. I just picked up a sweet (and FAST!) 4G USB flash drive for $10 and I can copy my entire Data partition onto it without even bothering with compression. At least this way, you have the stuff that _really_ matters. Everything else on your hard drive can be re-installed one way or another.

Large MP3 collections, photos, and video I keep in yet another partition which gets backed up to DVDs (and now to a NAS) because that stuff is pretty static-- I don't add much to those archives.

[oracleguy]

I would seem that when I installed an OLD XP disk on another drive it did not have service packs! OLD XP with no service pack apparently did not support drives over 128gig or so nor 48bit LBA.
So when I connected my 300gig Maxtor of course MICROSOFT did what it does best, it screwed something up!!!
Instead of just giving an error message or such it broke my partition and set it as a 128gig with 131gig not allocated and thus all my data was gone and the problem!

Correct it doesn't, there is a workaround for it though. You need 48-bit LBA to access a drive larger than 137GB, because there aren't enough addresses otherwise. But these days the easiest/best fix is to just install SP3. If you are going to be sticking with XP you should consider slipstreaming SP3 into your install disc so you don't have this problem in the future.

I did reinstall vanilla XP on a machine that also had a 250GB hard drive and I couldn't access it but it didn't corrupt the drive. As soon as I updated Windows it started working fine.

[Cowboy kid]

I keep most my important things on several drives. Things got messed up on me when a system went down. I built another and decided to try XP64 because I wanted more ram for 3d apps than 4 gigs. But XP64 would not run allot of my old software, I mean real OLD, one program is from WIN 3.1 days LOL

Anyway I've got my drives moved around to varies locations now and I get confused on what's where and which drive is which till I get this system I was working on up and running and put the other drives back in it where they will belong.

Until I get done playing with the O/S on it and decide what I am going to run for sure I never put the other drives in it yet, probably a good thing too since they are also large drives.

Yuck, just think if I had put all 4 drives back in at once! :eek:

[rhino56]

i have had very good luck with getdataback when i have accidentally erased files or formatted over a drive. Which stupidly enough has been more than once lol, runtime.org is where i got it. you do have to have 2 drives when you recover files because you cant recover them to the same drive. im sure there are other programs like the other one posted that work just as well though but just letting anyone know that i have had good results with this program. i am in no way affiliated with them.