Tim Lider wrote:

>   One problem here.  You should have booted into Command prompt only mode
> and completed the FDisk and Format through there.
>

Tim,

I appreciate the input, but I installed my drive d: from the dos prompt
under windows, it's been working correctly since last september.  Also,
when I rebooted after running fdisk, windows saw the drive as drive E:,
in fact, Nuts & Bolt's image, which I have running at startup, tried to
image drive E:.  I remember this distinctly, because it wouldn't just
let me fail on the image, I had to do a ctrl-alt-del and kill the image
program to shut it down.  Also, my cd-rom was showing up as well at this
point, after I rebooted, it disspeared along with the hard drive
partition.

>   This could be becuase either the new hard drive is not setup as the
> master drive correctly, a virus is lerking, or the CD-ROM was not setup
> correctly. I see you have a solution below.
>

It's set up correctly as a Master, I've triple checked the jumper
settings, and the cd-rom is set correctly as a slave, triple checked the
jumper settings on it as well.  As far as viruses, I have McAfee and I
updated the virus definitions a few days before this happened.  I scan
the computer constantly, it was and is clean, unless I got a brand new
virus somehow.

>   Do you need the data on the new hard disc?  If so the company I work for
> can help you. IIf you do not need the data back, this is what you can do.

I need the data, but I would rather recover it myself if at all
possible, I can't really afford to pay a company to do it, or I'd have
gone that route already.

Additional information, I downloaded Highpoint Databack Demo, and the
data is visible on the drive to it.  Interestingly, it showed the
drive's partition as "hidden".  Also, the scan was going well, with no
errors until it got right towards the end, all of a sudden it started
finding huge quantities of errors.  From this point on, it was unable to
read any of the sectors.  This seems to imply that a portion of the
drive failed.  The case was not bumped any before the failure, and it
couldn't be a heat failure, as I installed a cooling fan to blow air
across the drive to keep it cool.  (Since I know these bigger drives run
hot.)

It seems that the Highpoint software could recover my data for me, but
the price tag of $299 is a bit steep.   I'm also concerned about all of
this, as there doesn't seem to be a virus involved, but something really
strange has happened, I'd like to figure out what happened along with
getting the data back.

TIA,

Kevin