Vista trashed my drive ?

[cwdegood]

I have a single 140gb drive, I made a primary partition thats 120 gigs, and a logical drive that 20 gigs.

I used the 20 gig to back up my stuff before clean installing vista.

Installed vista, hated it, reinstalled Xp.

Now I am unable to access my backup drive, I've tried some recovery tools but they all fail when they begin to read sectors.

According to Xp the file type is "Raw" and there are 0 bytes available/free.

Any ideas ? All of my family pictures are stored on this drive

 

[EndGame]

First, you had access to it under Vista right?

Then, you slipped in the XP disk and formated the 120 partition and reinstalled XP right?

Now you don't have access to the logical drive?

Is that what happened? Because if so, it may not be Vista's fault. There's a flaw in XP that can cause this....but, it is recoverable. Do you have Partition Magic? If so, boot from your recovery disk and you'll be able to repair the logical partition and shouldn't lose a thing.

 

[corkyg]

Have you tried a System Restore to a pre-Vista date?