New hard drive problem - filesystem?

[Bugsy_malone 666]

right up to the point that windows ME was about i was alright with PCs and making them work building them new HDs etc, so 2-3 years ago i built my current new pc which had an ATA133 80gb HD.

arround xmas time it started to click randomly and then 2 weeks ago i ordered a new hard drive as I could just tell it was on its way out.

so the new hard drive is a 250gb ATA100 hitatchi which is great, I stuck it in the PC and found out how to partition it using windows XP, with 250gb at my disposal i started copying stuff over and i cut and pasted(so i didnt lose track of what had been copied to the new drive) several folders at a time so not to over work a dying drive.

with the 80gb getting worse, i decided to stick in a new 80gb hd I had and make it an operating system so the failing unit was just data transfer. however I have had a whole load of problems with this, I couldnt manage to get into windows xp as i seemed to have done something to put a password in i didnt know so i thought i know I`ll use good old Fdisk to delete the partition and start again, well that didnt work and just seemed to bugger things up more, so with a spare old 40gb hd i fitted xp to it then wiped the 80gb new drive, started again with the windows xp disc and got to a stage where windows XP was on a new 80gb HD.

I plug in my dying 80gb as a slave, fire the machine up and in theory i should have an 80gb main drive, a 250gb second drive and the an 80gb 3rd drive which was partitioned into bits. What i find is the 80gb main drive - accessable, 80gb dying drive - accessable and the 250gb drive seems to have 512mb of unallocated space and windows wont read it even though theres lots of stuff one there.

i get the feeling the bit thats the file system should be on that 512mb segment of drive thas unallocated, does anyone know how I can sorta fix my little problem before I pully my hair out and cry?

any help greatly appreciated!

[blakey_8]

For starters, Hitachi drives are bad lol. Commonly known as Hitachi Deathstars. Sell them or whatever and get Western Digital or Maxtor.

[aldouk]

Hey there,

Does indeed sound like you have the need to go drown your sorrows
It could well be that your NTFS partition is gubbed but you could try to use a number of tools to see if you can recover the partition/volume.

There is a product called ERD Commander 2005 that is really good for recoverying data off drives or fixing partitions. The company that made this product was bought over by Microsoft so it's changed its name now but still sure you can get it, google it and look for a site link fullandfree.info

You can get an eval for the latest version directly from the MS website
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...DisplayLang=en

Try them out and good luck, hope you get the data back, it's still there, just finding it will be the tricky part

Cheers

Al