I need your computer expertise, everyone.
Today the power went off here at home for a couple of hours. When it came back, the pc was walking alright, only the BIOS had reset. When I logged on to windows xp, though, it seemed to find a "new hard disk". Soon I realized it was my second hard disk, which used to be split into two partitions, and NTFS. Now the windows Disk Manager shows just one UNFORMATTED FAT disk, only 128 gb of (supposedly empty) space on it. The disk really is 300GB though.
It won't do anything till i "format" it. what I did was try a data recovery tool, which saw everything on the disk and is ready to recover it. however, I was wondering if there is a way for windows to properly recognize the disk, with its partitions and files so that I don't have to do recovery and backup for everything on it.
To put it as simply as I can, how can windows see the way my disk really was once more, together with its partitions/files, none of which were (seemingly) actually damaged?
you can see how the hard drive now appears in computer management in this pic
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=o6i6w8&s=3
ok, so the partition information/ partition table data has been damaged.
i can recover it FROM the damaged drive, but then do i not have to put it back on the disk? but that's not possible, because the disk appears unformatted and windows won't let me write anything on it.
I believe what you did is mess up some format info on the drive, specifically, the partition table data. Once this is straightened out, the drive's folder/file tables will be recognised also. But don't rely on Windows to do anything about it; it barely has the tools to defrag and check and repair errors. Use the recovery tools you found which seem to recognise that the data is all still there, but has to be updated in the NTFS data that the OS uses to determine how the drive is formated. Then Windows will recognize it fine.
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I believe what you did is mess up some format info on the drive, specifically, the partition table data. Once this is straightened out, the drive's folder/file tables will be recognised also. But don't rely on Windows to do anything about it; it barely has the tools to defrag and check and repair errors. Use the recovery tools you found which seem to recognise that the data is all still there, but has to be updated in the NTFS data that the OS uses to determine how the drive is formated. Then Windows will recognize it fine.
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