LOCK THIS, GOT IT FIXED

[gil11542]

I had a HDD in a computer with an A7V133 I was not running RAID. I was using the HDD as a BackUp drive and had a bunch of my stuff on it. Today I was gonna take the drive out of that Box and stick it in my main computer which has a SOYO Dragon Ultra in it. I removed it from the A7V133 system and installed it on the secondary plug on the cable in my Dragon system and booted it up, Then a DOS screen came up and said that there was something wrong with my Array I think it said it was broken. But I didnt have an array setup I ran 2 drives on the A7V133 a Pri and a sec, I added the secondary after I loaded the OS on the primary which I have done with this Back up drive several times in differrent machines. Well At this DOS screen there were several choices and I first choose ignore and boot anyway which after booting showed no seconday HDD so I rebooted and choose a another option which was remove the broken array and then booted and still no drive showed up in MY COMPUTER. I then pulled the drive and installed it back in the A7V133 hoping it would show up but it didnt.

On both systems it shows up in the boot screen and in the Device mang. after booting but it is not in MY COMPUTER where I can gain access to the info on it. I stuck a 98 boot disk in and tried to access it that way by changing the A prompt to a D promt but it says there is no D drive. I changed the Jumpers on the A7V133 for RAID and brought up the RAID ARRAY UTILITY to see if there was a way to fix it there but no luck.

Am I just screwed or is there hope, I had a lot of stuff on this drive some of it Backed up to disk but some not.

 

[Tarmouth]

Boot back to the boot disk and run fdisk to see what format the drive is in.

 

[Tarmouth]

A few more questions came to mind, whats the jumper settings ? And what OS's are you using ?

 

[gil11542]

My Jumper setting on the HDD are set to SLAVE and I am running XP pro on Both Systems FAT 32

I will see if FDISK tells me anything

 

[Tarmouth]

If fdisk doesn't recognize it then theres a problem. Switch the cable out and make sure it isn't causing problems. After I'd try putting it on IDE2 as a master and see if it can be read that way.

 

[gil11542]

FDISK Says NO PARTITION DEFINED, I set it up as MASTER and SWITCHED CABLES and tried ALL IDE PORTS, Does this mean my DATA is GONE

 

[Tarmouth]

Hate to be the bearer of bad news but..... If fdisk sees the drive and there's no partition then, yes your data is gone

 

[gil11542]

OHHHHHHHHHHHH I must go CRY Now..............................

 

[Tarmouth]

After your done crying lets look at this closer You say it was readable when you removed it from the old system? It seems odd to me that the partition would just vanish!

 

[gil11542]

Seems Odd to me also, The only thing I can figure is when I chose to remove the broken array, or maybe the drive died between systems. I would think I would have to format the drive to remove the DATA but if it is still there I dont know how to see it or move it from the drive.

 

[Tarmouth]

Well I'm not sure what removing a broken array will do. I never messed with raid , although i probably should learn it. Maybe one of the raid gurus will grace us with an answer.

 

[Markfw]

Well, just by the fact that you got the "array broken", it sounds like you had a raid array, but didn't know it. Then when you picked the option to remove the broken array, it wiped out the "half" of the array, which makes it worthless. Does the first drive boot up on the A7V333 ? You could have had a raid array with two partitions, and maybe this confusion led to the problem.

Just guessing at this point.

 

[mandrake88]

gil, why don't you put it back to the old system and see what happens.
seems like this is the only chance you have left to see if your data is still intact.

 

[gil11542]

I did put it back in the Old system A7V133 and No Drive shows up.

 

[Rainguy]

Charlie,

You problably wiped out your partition table by accidently picking "yes" to create a RAID array. At this point the only hope I see of you getting your data back would be to use a utility like Easy Recovery Pro 6.0. I have used this several times to get the data off onto another drive in situations like this. I know there are a few other utilities like this but, that is my favorite.

 

[gil11542]

Thank you for the help and I have GREAT news, Norton DiscDoctor fixed my partition and all is GOOD. I am so HAPPY.

 

[Rainguy]

w00t!