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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