Big Problem with Hard Drives

[darley]

This will be a long explanation...please bear with me.

I have 6 hard drives that I have data on.

They are all Maxtor and Western Digital IDE Drives. I never use them all at once.

One is my boot 20GB drive with Windows XP Pro. That stays put. The others I use as slaves.

80GB Maxtor on Master 2nd Channel with my TDK VeloCD Burner as the slave.

30GB Maxtor on Master 1st Channel on IDE Card with 13GB Western Digital as slave.

I am running Athlon 750 on a Soyo K7VIA.

384 MB Ram, 32 MB All in Wonder, Actiontec 1394 FireWire Card, Adaptec ULTRA 100 Controller Card, and Adaptec SCSI card.

Here is the problem.

Last night my computer locked up. I left it alone and came back later thinking it would be done doing what it was doing. I waited about 20 minutes. When I came back it was still frozen. I decided to restart the machine. I clicked CTRL-ALT-DEL and clicked reboot. Went away for another 10 minutes and nothing. It was at this point I pushed the reset button on the case.

Problem!

When the computer rebooted the IDE card was not recognized as usual by the BIOS. I let the computer fully boot and then restarted it. Still not recognized. I then shut the machine down and unhooked the drives from the machine and rebooted. Everything was fine. I shut down and put the 30GB Master on the IDE card and rebooted. Still not recognized. I then shut down again and moved the 30GB Master to the Slave position of the 20 GB Wester Digital Master on the 1st IDE Channel. The computer booted fine. When it started the computer let me know that it had just found my 30GB hard drive on the 1st Channel Slave. I wondered why it would tell me that?

I attempt to open the drive from My Computer and it says that the drive (D is not formatted, would I like to format it now?

HELL NO!

Where did my info go?

I went and immediately shut down the machine and places the drive back in its original place as the Master on the IDE card. At this point it was recognized by the BIOS and I once again attempted to access it. STILL NO DATA!

What happened? How can I fix this? What is wrong?
WHY WHY WHY?

I am really frustrated. Thank you for any help or words of wisdom.

 

[Lonman]

Do a complete virus scan to rule out the possiblity that your system is compromised.

Get yourself a copy of PowerQuest's Lost and found... unplug that drive until you can secure the recovery software to see if it will recover it for you. I think they offer a free demo... it will find it but it won't do the recover unless you get a full version. let us know how that goes.

 

[insaNity]

Theres some good recovery tools over at SysInternals

 

[Kosmas G. Synad]

Darley,
I am not exactly a PC expert but, after spendinf a lot of time building my own PC I think I've learned the following:

1. When plugging/unplugging ribbon cables from HDs you can expect a high probability that "Ribbon Cables" are the most common cause about your described problem(s). Push and then push some more the connectors to make sure they are plugged in!

2. Right click on "My Computer" then click on "Properties", then click on "Device Manager" . Then check to see if you have any repeated lines on the ISK Drives" or "Disk Drive Controllers".
If you do, then "REMOVE" them. Your OS will find and reinstall devices if you removed one in error.

3. See if you have enough Power (300w pwr supply) to support your many HDs. It's much better to reduce the number of HDs.

4. Reset your card which your are using for the additional HDs.

5. Since your problem, I belive, appeared after you worked on your HDs, I do not think you have a PC virus..

6. You might have a wrong jumper in one or two of your HDs and they might appear to work but they will cause intermitten problems.

Good luck.

Kosmas G. Synadinos