Thanks Rick, (and Randy) but this one won't let me make a bootable disk unless I buy it. I've tried several data
recovery demo programs, but none have found a single partition on either drive. I ran Maxtor's PowerMax 4.09 and it
reports both drives as "failing". As they are both pretty new drives I doubt these results. However, although FDISK
lets me create pri-dos, ext-dos and logical partitions, they all disappear upon reboot - before I can format them.
I'm going to try one of the drives in my old pentium - if I can partition it there, perhaps this unit's bios is
messed up? What fools me the most is that the boot drive was fully operational, and I wasn't partitioning it, so
what could I have done to mess up the mbr? Even with Maxtor's extensive database, there's little about this kind of
problem. I've partitioned several multiple-drive systems and have never seen anything like this - I'm really at a
loss here. Anyone ever run up against this? Thanks for any thoughts...

Al Thompson

----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard Glazier"
Subject: Re: [PCBUILD] Lost Partitions on Two HDD's


> Sorry for the delay in answering...
>
> Acronis has a program called RecoveryExpert.
> Since you seem to have only UN-allocated space now(?),
> it "should" go in and re-construct what you "got rid of"...
>
> You might need to know the (approx.) sizes and locations of
> the valid partitions that you want to recover - since it sometimes
> gives "multiple choices" of former partitions and these (by
> definition) will almost always overlap, which is NOT allowed
> (of course...)
>
> The bad news is, I do not believe the program is available
> separately anymore. It was so small, they used to give it away
> free as a perk to buy other programs, but eventually rolled it
> into a suite...
>
> I have used Norton Utilities to recover partitions too, (a VERY
> long time ago).  Not sure they still support that part of their
> suite...
>                                                        Rick Glazier
>
> From: "Al Thompson" <[log in to unmask]>
> > I've lost all 11 partitions on two hard drives at the same time,
> > while working only on HDD 2.
> clipped
> > ( 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 )
>
>                          PCBUILD's List Owners:
>                       Bob Wright<[log in to unmask]>
>                        Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>

                         PCBUILD's List Owners:
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