Data Recovery.

[Wizard]

tl;dr need data recovery software to recover data from reported "Invalid" logic partitions. reads in bios but not in windows.

 

tlversion;

 

I was doing some cable cleaning and disconnected all my sata drives from PC. Everything was properly shut down, hit the current switch in the back to off, properly grounded myself. (*1) I reattach my sata drives and reformatted a spare hdd for windows to use to figure out what went wrong. Paragon Disc manager hits a couple of I/O errors on one of my sata drives reporting invalid partitions. I double checked cables and see if there was any physical damage to the drive. Nada, so I switched around my physical drive order by hooking my drive to ide channel 0 (according to bios which reads my sata drive) and nothing. Bios picks it up but windows still reports nothing.

 

Previous to my cable cleanery, the drive was working fine, all 4 (includes windows partition) partitions were working correctly along with about 320 GB left in unpartitioned space. Which leads to (*1). I know the drive physically still works, windows reports 20 GB and 8MB of unpartitioned space (Out of about 900~ GB).

 

I'm not sure, but it might be an MBR error or something of the like.

 

Free software or the like to aid in recovery process. Bout ~400GB of data to recover. Mostly consisting of my delicious music collection.

[gavin19]

If Windows isn't recognising everything then your best bet is something like Techie Tools or Hiren's boot disk. Both give you a lot of DOS apps that you can try to recover with. The one that helped me a lot in a similar situation was Active @ Partition Recovery.

 

Here is a link to Hiren's website.

Edited December 21, 2008 by gavin19