UH OH. i may have lost many years of work.. unless

[superpenguin79]

1. Have there been any type of new hardware, software, spyware, virus, or windows updates on the drive that you are aware of?

2. How important is the information on the drive? There are drive recovery places out there to recover information, but I will advise you that they usually start at $3000 and work their way up to recover hard drives.

3. Do you have any of this information stored in an alternate place? Like the above post mentioned, if it does not exist in atleast 2 places, it does not exist at all.

4. Do you use this computer for web surfing, or do you use it strictly for audio? One trick I always do is use one computer for web, and one for audio at home. I simply transfer data via external hard drive or zip disc to get stuff back and forth.

5. yeah, go with a couple of the programs that the guys reccomend for you for starters. It will be your cheapest bet. You can always attempt to pop the drive into an alternate machine to recover data, or re-install the drive like cruisemates suggested. If you do have a virus though or something like that, another computer isn't nessecarily a good call.

6. If you don't mind losing data on there, and you have backups somewhere, simply format the drive clean and go from there.

Goodluck on the recovery if you go that rout. Computers can be the best thing or the worst half the time.

[metaltim]

yeh im goin with the email the poster above sent me..
i happen to come across that same recovery program and was thinking of buying it, now that someone else has used it i definately will..

the drive is just storage drive for all my pro tools sessions.
the computer is online, which i hate and am trying to get a second computer, but as i posted before, im having troouble getting that system to see the full 120 Gb HD i have in there.

once i figure that out, than yeh, it will be offline.

the system drive was clean, i reformatted it 3 days ago, hadnt put anything on there that i downloaded, just office (a real copy)
not even an instant messanger!
3 grand is a bit high.. i didnt know it was that much hah.

it's about 4 years of work on the drive. i backed up a while back, but about 80% of what ive done i did in the last 6 months, havne't backed up since then, cuase i didnt have a big enough drive.
now i got this 200Gb, i was gonna back on the 120G, but was in the process of moving and never got around to it...
Now i know.

im using driver recovery software right now.. we'll see what happens.
so far, it sees 120 Gb of data on there, so maybe it can get it.

tim

[neomodo]

easy recovery pro is pretty good.

You mentioned formatting and reinstalling your system drive - have you opened up the disk management doohickey yet and checked for clues? Was (is) it a dynamic disk did you have it striped at any point in time - have you run checkdisk? try the eval of diskeeper and see if defrag of MFT does anything for you... (that one is a stretch but you never know)

[metaltim]

well ill thank neat guys.. that program so far is doing wonders.
its seeing every file, but it isnt able to recover every file.. but it's better than nothing.

heres my problem.
i want to recover the whole drive onto my 120 Gb IBM. (all my recording data is about 100Gb)

but the drive is still showing up as 30 GB. (i posted this ealier)
ive run the IBM drive fitness test, a dos based thingy..
this comp is relatively new, plus, this ibm drive was on here for about a year (up until i got the new 200Gb WD that is messing up on me)

it shows up EVERYwhere as 30 GB. in disk management, in bios, in the dos based ibm thing..


wtf.
what am i missing here, why cant i get all 120 gb of this drive. once i do that i can start recovering files.

please continue helping.. i WILL get my files back

[Allen Hallada]

Have you tried a simple defrag of the hard drive yet? It may show you where the damage is on the hard drive also and fix it for you so you can access the rest.

Allen

[metaltim]

i have, it says i cant cause checkdisk is scheduled to run.
i run checkdisk and it does nothing, just gives errors. before i ran that i could see and access all my files..
chkdsk is what got me here in the first place, so im not running it again, which means i cant defragment..

but anyway for now i need to get this drive limitation off of my 120Gb.
if i can then i can use this program to restore my files, it's worked for most of the files ive done already, but my system drive is only 20 gigs.. i need my 120..

anyone with ideas on this limitaion..
i put in my new computer but its still only 30 gb.
its not bios i have a 200 gb drive in there right now.
i formatted it ntfs. it just wont give

thanks
tim

[lemix]

metaltim ,
Sorry dude, and I feel for ya..
That 30 Gb sounds awfully close to FAT32's 32 Gb file size limit !! ( 32 Gb..)
Was that drive originally partitioned with multiple Fat partitions ?? Or NTFS ?
It looks as it has lost its partition/allocation table info...I'd try on another computer, from DOS.
Sorry I can't help more..

good luck,

[metaltim]

the drive originally went in the same computer im putting it in now.
and all 120 Gb were there..
then when i got my new bigger drive, i put it in an old computer..
thats the first time it showed up as 30 Gb..

now im putting in a different computer.. back in the original one i had it in..
its still 30 gb

is there something out there, that will just reset the drive or something..

[KingFish]

I'm with lemix with the 32gb limit, however, if it's NOT that, and you've had this drive previously formatted, registering, and operating at 120gb, then itsounds like the volume information on the drive is seriously corrupt.

I was going to reccomend trying to mount the drive in different situations, (which you already did, moving it to another computer)

your best bet, is the data recovery path you were on, save all you can, try mounting the disk in several other situations, ie.. a usb or firewire enclosure. Try a friend's Mac... you just never know !

try running a thourough scandisk, selecting repair, I'd do a DOS level thourough scandisk if you can.

Try every data recovery app you can, and when you've got what you need, wipe the partition information from the disk, reset the primary partition, and format.

"Reseting the disk" either Fdisk in dos, or deleting, the primary partition in windows disk management, you'll know when you create a New primary partition, using all available space, that if it shows up "THEN" as a 30 gig drive, you've got actual hardware failure, and the drive itself is toast.

at that point, if there is no warranty, throw it out, or ... It could be the logic board, if you were lucky enough to find one (the exact revision) for a few bucks on e-bay, or the internet, you could try swapping boards, (i've just recently done this with success on what was thought to be a completely dead drive out at the studio)

[metaltim]

yeh thats what im afraid of, the drive never had any problems, dont know why it would be dead..
it doesnt even have data on it, it is totally empty. so data recovery isnt an issue..

what i was talking about, thats another drive. i want to recover that data onto this 120 gb drive.. but, as we all know now its only showing as 30 gb..

so reformatting and such is no problem, cause like i said, the drive is empty, no data.

tim