Bizarre semi-reformatted HD

[Scee]

I have a deathstar HD that I pulled from a windows XP machine where I had been transferring files from it to a new HD (previously the IBM drive had been in a 98se box). Then I stuck it in another 98se machine to use as a secondary HD. I right clicked and reformatted the drive. Then I transferred a couple of gigs onto it and all seemed well.

However, after I rebooted the machine now all I can see is one of the partitions that was originally on the hard drive, that I assumed formatting would erase. The files I transferred are no where to be found. I?ve run r-studio on the drive and it hasn?t turned them up either, although it sees the whole drive. At the moment all windows can see is the first 10 gigs of the drive (originally the c-partition).

Any suggestions for getting back the files I transferred onto the drive back? If they?re definitely gone, how can I get windows to see and reformat the entire drive?

Thanks.

 

[PCHPlayer]

I don't quite understand what happened, but if the drive was originally on a windows XP machine it may have been formatted as NTFS. Win98 will not be able to read NTFS. My suggestion is to use the win98 fdisk program to delete all logical drives and partitions, then create one large primary partition as FAT32 and format.

 

[FlyingPenguin]

Just a thought: Any idea if someone installed a disk manager on that drive? These were installed to allow newer large drives to work on older systems that didn't support large drives. Once that crap is on a drive, it makes the partitions unreadable, and the drive cannot be properly re-partitioned or formatted unless you either boot from the drive to allow the disk manager BIOS to run, or you remove the disk manager (which usually requires the original disk manager disk that it was installed with).

Even an MBR wipe and zeroing the drive won't get rid of the disk manager crap.

Norton GoBack also acts the same way. You need to uninstall GoBack to return the drive to normal.