Can I repair a partition and save my info?

I have 2 HDD (an 80 GB Maxtor & a 250 GB Seagate Barracuda) and I recently reformatted and re-installed Win XP on a 25 GB partition on the Maxtor. Before I reinstalled the OS the Seagate worked just fine AND its where I backed up all my data.

After the reinstall the Seagate is seen by the device manager but is not assigned a drive letter. The device manager recognizes only 1 of the 4 partitions and in one pane labels the partition as it correct size, but in the other pane labels it as 232.88 GB.

I REALLY don't want to lose the data on the Seagate and I was hoping that there was a utility that would repair the partition info ... any ideas? Failing that does anyone have any other ideas?

Thanks for any help you can give!

 

Hi,
First thing is probably to put the 250 Seagate into another computer and see if you can see the whole drive there. If it is an IDE/PATA drive you may need to check the jumper settings.

The Seagate utilities Seatools should be able to give you information about the drive (the setup utilities DiskWizard may also give you information). If there is a problem with the partitioning information and you cannot access the data any other way, use the utilities to "Back-up the MBR ", the try "Update the MBR" and check for the presence of a Dynamic Drive Overlay.

If the utilities are the only way to see the full drive, when you exit the utilities it should leave you in DOS, you could use DOS commands to copy the data.

Matt

 

I fixed it!

Thanks for the posts I appreciate your taking the time to help.

After I posted this thread I kept searching the web for something ... anything that might help. I finally got lucky and found an article on PCStats.com that mentioned a little program called TestDisk 6.7. It found and repaired the partition info on the 250GB drive. I still don't know what went wrong, but this little program fixed it.

Thanks again.