Hard Disk Woes - partition formatting lost for good?

I've had this happen to 3 hard drives in the last couple of months. First, a friend gave me his 80 GB HD which he had dropped from about a foot off the desk. It registers in the BIOS as an 80GB disk, but windows refuses to go past that. I'm thinking he knocked the needle out of alignment, and whether this is the case or not, is it repairable?
The second thing that happened, both to the C partition of a brand new laptop, and to a brand new 120GB hard disk i bought. the first was formatted with basic, the second dynamic. All NTFS of course.
So one fine day they just refuse to read. i've checked them previously with chkdsk and disk doctor, and it said they were perfectly healthy. so in diskmgmt.msc all of a sudden it says they're empty "raw" partitions, with 100% free space. of course i know they're not empty, because one had the windows OS on them. and the other i just copied 50 GB of data to it. so i try to reformat them without losign the data, or just to get it back to the ntfs file system without losing my data. but i'm at a blank wall. how do i do that?

 

 

 

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You could try using Windows XP CD. Boot up your computer with CD-Rom set as the first boot device, then run XP through that. I'm sure it comes with a built-in repair tool.

As for the HD with the drop problem, you're best taking it to the manufacturer's or going to a good PC store that does repairs.

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it is also a possiblity that a virus formatted your drives or corrupted the table in the dirve (NTFS) thats why its reported as empty. In that case it would be very hard to retrieve your files since the only way to recover or access the files is through the NTFS table.

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ok then, i tried booting the laptop from the cd rom. works fine, except that when i get to the install page, i have C, D, and E. D and E are formatted properly with NTFS, while C is simply raw. So i thought i'd install to the D drive, but it won't let me do that without first formatting C -- which is what i'm trying to avoid. For the other HD, running chkdsk from the recovery mode and then scandisk recovered the drive and files intact. Not working though for the C drive.

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I actually had something similar happen a long time ago (random improper formatting of a drive) and never found a viable solution. At the time I had only one system and one HD in it so I couldn't exactly put much time into looking for a solution as I NEEDED my computer up and running for school related things. Since it was a formatting issue, you can't just install windows on it so I had to format and install the OS. I then used an undelete program to recover approx 25%-50% of my data files. Obviously programs were all shot as they had random files corrupted but that wasn't a big deal, just reinstall everything.

Since you have other drives that you can move the recovered data to I would suggest the following. Find an undelete utility on google and scan the corrupted HD. See if the data is still present or not (should be, since data is there until over written), since you'll be able to move it to one of the non-screwed up drives theoretically if most of the data shows up, you could safely recover almost everything without worrying about overwriting as you recover (that was my problem, on the one drive as I recovered some files others got over written). This is not the best solution but if you get to the point where you are just going to format it, it would be good to try this first to see what you can save.

Good luck

 

 

 

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I recently had problems with my HDD, I am a linux user and there utilities in linux which can read the SMART healt status of HDD (it includes tempratures and self diagnostics) its likely your 80gig HDD has SMART capability as it became common when 80gigs started coming to market.

Secondly what you can do is get Diagnositc Softwares from teh VENDORs website. In my case i got a small 1.4 MB iso image from Maxtor site, The CD boots and performs checks on the HDD,

If it says you have HDD problems then you certainly need to get a new one ..cause this may crash any time. But if it says all is ok and still crashes ..you may be having a Power Supply Issue. Better get things checked from your local Hardware Tecnnician / Guru. Hope ur HDD is still under some warrenty.

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well warranty here in pak is sort of an issue, isn't it? since the power fluctuates so much you basically get a 10 month warranty on the HD. so i'm just about out of that. yeah it has smart capability, and the wierd thing is that up till the day it crashed it said it was perfectly healthy. i thought the warning system would give me at least a day's worth advance notice. if all it does is after the fact newsflashes i wonder what its purpose is.
I tend to lean in favor of a power supply issue. that wouldn't be so uncommon here. as a matter of fact, i lost a monitor and 3 power supplies the other day when i had an "electrician" come to the house, and he switched the house current to 440 VOLTS, of all the stupid things.

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