For anyone who followed this post back in July...
I believe I've found the reason for the lost partitions. I'm pretty sure I messed up the mbr by creating and
re-creating partitions on the 80GB drive WITHOUT rebooting between partition creation and deletion. It would seem a
silly mistake, but I recall doing the same thing on my own hdd without running into this problem(!?). One
suggestion was that I created and deleted partitions more than 5 times before rebooting, which I'm fairly sure I
did on the 80GB drive, but not on my drive. I wouldn't think there'd be any gray area here - either you reboot
after partitioning a drive or you don't - but my drive seems to have supported the latter. Does this make sense or
sound familiar to anyone?
Al Thompson
----- Original Message -----
From: "Al Thompson"
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, July 10, 2004 10:35 PM
Subject: [PCBUILD] Lost Partitions on Two HDD's
> Hey,
>
>
> The short story...
>
> I've lost all 11 partitions on two hard drives at the same time, while working only on HDD 2.
>
>
>
> The long story...
>
> IDE 1
> Master: Maxtor 40GB
> Slave: Maxtor 80GB
>
> IDE 2
> Master: Sony CD-ROM RW
> Slave: Creative DVD
>
> The 40GB...Pri Dos with 4 logical drives
> Win ME on C:, along with D:,E:, & F: drives.
> C: was active.
> This was working fine.
>
> However, on the 80GB...
> After creating drives G thru M (in the Ext dos partition) and exiting FDISK*, I was prompted to shutdown before
> formatting the drives, as expected. I removed the boot disk in A:, then shut down. (oops?) Upon reboot she looked
> at A:, then HD 0, and on to CD-ROM for the OS - "Boot disk failure: insert system disk..."
> Once at A: I'm getting 'invalid drive specification' for all drives.
> FDISK shows no drives defined on either HDD.
> During post, both HDD's names are just strange characters - they were fine before**
> (both cd drives are recognized properly).
>
> *During the sizing of the partitions, I deleted newly created logical drives several times until I got the sizes
> right, but all of this was definitely done on drive 2, without rebooting between deletions.
>
> **I had recently created the extended dos partition on this drive, along with 6 logical drives. That was working
> fine, and both HDD's showed during post. However, the owner wanted the drive sizes changed on HDD 2. Although I
> carefully deleted each logical drive, I never thought to delete or create a new extended dos drive. (oops?)
>
> Have I messed up the mbr?
> I really want to get the data back that's on the 40GB.
> Is this something I can salvage myself, or can Maxtor, or a third party?
> I really don't want to tell the owner all his girlie pictures are forever lost!
>
> I think I've clearly listed everything I did, but I may have forgotten something important. I'll add anything if
I
> remember.
> ( I had had each drive as master on IDE 1 & 2, with the CD-ROM and dvd as slaves, but ATA 33 was the limit -
hence
> both HDD's on IDE 1 )
>
> Thanks very much in advance for any insight, thoughts and suggestions...
>
> Al Thompson
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