whats going on?

[Friendly]

i have a 10 gig hd with xp pro installed as master and a 60 gig hd as secondary with win 2000 pro installed on it.
The 10 gig has 1 partition and the 60 gig had about 6 partitions on it.

I changed the master drive to the the 60 gig with win 2000 on it and it booted up 1st time around although very slowly.

As I had a scanner installed in xp, (Microtek 3800) when I booted to win 2000 it asked me to install the hardware, software which I did. ( I dont believe that can be a sofware issue though) and then it asked me to restart the computer for the changes to take effect.

When I went to restart, the bios would only recognise the 60 gig as a 25 gig and wouldn?t boot past, Verifying DMI Pool data
I went in to setup and tried to get the bios to recognise the 60 gig but it would only recognise it as a 25 gig.

I changed the hard drives back around to the 10 gig with xp O/S on it and it boots up fine but will only recognise the 60 gig slave as a 25 gig and it will now only show one partition on the 60 gig, where as before it had about 6 partitions on it.

When I clicked on the drive, it said that the drive wasn?t formatted and would I like to format it.

When I went in to disk management it showed the 60 gig slave hard drive as being only one partition and it said although it is healthy it is in need of a format and that it is a 790.39 gigabyte.

It is formatted and it has heaps of partitons on it. I have tried changing cables (ide controllers around) No difference.

The Bios has now decided to recognise the hard drive as being a 60 gig again but there is still no partitions or info to be found on my hard drive.
I tried running Nortons Disk Doctor on it but it said that the hard drive needed to be formatted.

Why isnt the partitions being recognised properly? How can all the data on my hard drive just dissapear with a reboot.
And why did the BIOS recognise the size of my Hard drive so strangly?



Could this be something to do with disk clash? The computer wasnt moved around atall.
Or could the install of the Microteck software corrputed the whole hard drive. 'Surely it could only have caused a problem with 2000 MBR at the very worst and not the loss of all the partitions.

Any ideas anyone

 

[kursplat]

well your info is probably still on the 60gig. you'll most likley need a data recovery program of some sort. do a forums search and you will get a few sugestions. then you can back it up and try to restore the partion table or do a complete reinstall from scratch. (oldest OS first).
if all you wanted to do is make win 2000 the default boot OS you just needed to go to system properties\advanced\startup and recovery and select it from the "default operating system" window (in win xp). that would have edited the boot.ini file for you and swaped the boot order.
as you found out , windows HATES having the boot drive moved around.
good luck

 

[Friendly]

thanks for the reply but if you read properly you will see that both OS systems were on different hard drives.
I was just swapping the hard drives around. Shouldnt have been a problem.
You cant actually change the boot order if one of them is on a slave drive.
You can only change the boot order if they are both on the master hard drive.
My actuall problem is that for no apparent reason is that all the info off one of the hard drives including the partitons, just up and dissapeard, but the hard drive still seems to be working fine and just needs reformatting. What I dont understand is how this can happen.
Any way thanks for trying to help though. Much appreciated.

 

[kursplat]

i must have missed something in this . was this a dual boot ? or did you just have a different OS installed on 2 different HD's and were swapping the drives whenever you wanted to boot a different one ?
good luck

 

[Friendly]

When I 1st tried to boot from my 60 gig, it booted up fine. I then installed a scanner on it and went to reboot.
Thats when the bios wouldnt recognise it at 1st, then it would only recognise it as a 25 gig. I kept rebooting it and trying I finally got the bios to recognise it as a 60 gig.
But now it will only boot up to the Verifying DMI data pool.
I checked all the cables, jumper settings, virus scan etc.
I reinstalled a hard drive with winxp on it and installed the 60 gig as a secondary drive to check out what was on the 60 gig. It showed nada. The O/S and all the data including all the partitions had just up and vanished.
'Why would this happen. The hard drive still spins nice and quietly and appears to work fine.
set up as a slave in xp it is shown under disk managment as a healthy unforamtted drive and all the info, partitions have just up and dissapeard.

suggestions that i have had are

.
Corrupt boot files on the computer. How there is none as they have vanished?

Settings for hard disk drive are not correct. Jumpers checked

Boot devices not set properly. My other hard drive boots up fine. also boot order has been checked

BIOS corrupt or misc. setting not set properly. It reads my other hard drive fine

Connections loose or disconnected. Been checked.

Bad Hard disk drive or other bad hardware Bad hard drive maybe but it seems to be working fine and is seen be
a healthy drive in xp disk management. ( just says not formatted)

any body got any ideas as to what is going on?
I have noticed that my old 10 gig is running much much colder than the newer 60 gig problem drive.
It is very very warm all though not that hot that I cant handle it comfortably. Could this be the cause.
I have all the data backed up so it is no biggy but would love to try to figure out what has caused this problem. And if it is at all retreivable with out using data recovery..Any suggestions please.

 

[nineball9]

Just a thought - if you have a USB attached scanner, the install process may create a Generic Volume under USB Mass Storage Devices. Dunno how win2k will handle the device.

 

[kursplat]

try the drive manufacturers utilities on it. runn all the tests that DON'T erase info . if that doesn't do it you may need a data recovery program.
good luck