Recovering data from my old hard disc drive (HDD)

[rock_king_my]

Hi.

I'm currently using a P4 with XP SP2. Have a couple of HDD in it, partitioning into C, E, F, G. This is my 2nd PC.

D & H drives are DVD-writers.

The problem is not with these drives but the internal HDD from my old PC. Bear with me, readers!

My old PC's motherboard (from my 1st PC) is screwed so I decided to take the HDD from my old PC & connected it to my new PC via USB to SATA / IDE cable. It originally had XP SP2 too.

So my old HDD (C & D drive in my old PC back then) are now I & J drive to my new PC respectively. It's a 40GB HDD partitioned equally into 2 (obviously!).

I can view / navigate through the I drive but not the J drive. In Windows Explorer, I can see J drive listed but it doesn't have a figure for "Total Size" or "Free Space".

When I click on the J drive, I got "disc not formated. Do you want to format it" message? Of course I don't, I want to explore it. I have not re-formatted my I & J drives before, since I bought it years ago, just to point that out.

So is it possible to recover the contents of my J drive? I know I can just format the J drive to re-use it but I will lose all its contents.

I hope the tale above makes sense .. ask me for more info it it doesn't. See the picture enclosed my C to J drives in Explorer.

CHEERS!

[Chewy]

try disconnecting one of you ide drives and connect the old one directly

just take the side off your case and put the old drive on a small cardboard box so the cables will reach

make sure it's jumpered master and at the end of the ide cable?

[rock_king_my]

Recovering data from my old hard disc drive (HDD)

Hi

I haven't "temp slave" it because I don't wanna open my new PC myself in case I screw up my new PC. That's why I got myself that USB to SATA / IDE cable, to use the old HDD externally.

I opened up my old PC to get that old HDD coz it (my old PC) was screwed anyway.

I forgot to mention that the 1st time hooked up my I & J drive to my new PC via USB to SATA / IDE cable, both I & J drive worked. However, I must have "stupidly" manually deleted some files & folders from the I & J drives to make some space but they were just stuff I don't need (e.g. media files, dvd rippers, media players, anti-virus/spyware progs etc) but nothing major like Systems folder.

The next time I rebooted my PC, Explorer makes no mention of Total Size / Free Space of my J drive (thou it's still listed).

I hope my J drive is still recoverable by using some reliable software.

[Chewy]

every partition contains a hidden system folder called System Volume Information, where the file structure is stored

you must have deleted it by mistake is my best guess

google file recovery programs

[NightbladeXX]

yeah need to repair the boot sector, try Acronis' products its what I personally use and use for my biz
the disk director software can repair the sector for u and allow u to gran the files u need off of it

[Chewy]

unlikely his boot sector is damaged as that would normally hose both partitions

[NightbladeXX]

true either way the disk director would recover/repair it to make it functional