[DevilJac]

Howdy. I recently purchased a 500gb hard drive, hooked it up as the master (cable select on, plugged to end of IDE cable) drive on the secondary IDE channel of the motherboard then initialized and formatted it in WinXP SP2. Once this was done, the drive was recognized as "healthy, working" in WinXP and I copied around 50gb of saved files to it from my main 120gb (primary IDE of hard drive) drive. After the copying was finished, I double-checked that I had everything moved that I wanted and then shut down the computer. I then took the computer apart and rebuilt it using the same motherboard in a larger case with more air flow. I booted from the WinXP disk and deleted the partition on my old 120gb hard drive and reinstalled a fresh copy of WinXP. This worked well until Windows booted up and my 500gb drive was showing as "unallocated" in disk manager. Right-clicking on this disk in disk manager only gives me the "format/create partition" choice. The drive, as stated previously, was already formatted for WinXP with NTFS and has quite a bit of saved data on it, so I do not want to format it. Does anyone have any ideas as to where my data went to or how to get it back?

Thanks.

[HVAC888]

That's a tough one. Are you *SURE* you deleted the correct partition during XP install?

Also, just a shot in the dark, after the XP install, did you install updated IDE drivers? Usually from the Motherboard CD for the chipset that the MB is using.

You may need this driver first, in order to have LBA 48bit addressing enabled, so that XP can recognize the hard drive properly.

[DevilJac]

During the XP install I am positive I deleted the correct partition. Two reasons: 1) The hard drive showing partitions was Device 0 (and the hard drive that I wanted to install XP on was plugged in as the master on my primary IDE) 2) I had 3 partitions previously on this drive (C,D,E) that all showed up and were deleted before installing XP. This was my first hint that something was wrong since the master on the secondary IDE (device 1) should have showed an active partition on it. I had thought maybe it would resolve itself during/after the install.

After I got XP installed I updated my motherboard drivers then installed SP2.

I tried using SeaTools DOS yesterday and both of my 500gb drives were showing up with no errors after the "long drive test," which took about 6.5hrs to run on both, although the drive that "should" have my data on it gave an error of "InitDiskError device 1 cannot read from sector 0" (paraphrased from memory-might not be word-for-word) three times while the SeaTools DOS was loading.

That help you in any way?

Thank you for your help.

[HVAC888]

Sector 0 is the MBR. Is the drive properly detected in BIOS?

Enter the Recovery console by booting the XP install cd.

Here you can try two commands:

*WARNING* - Use at own risk. Your 50GB of data may be lost unfortunately.............But the drive should be recovered.

1. Scandisk /r (I think its r. Use the /? Command to determine).

Windows can try to correct any errors on the 500GB drive.

2. Fixmbr.

This writes a new MBR into sector 0, making it readable by Windows. Hopefully the partition table is intact, which means your data should still be there.

If you use fixmbr first, reboot and see if its recognized by Windows.

[HVAC888]

Something to add above, if not yet already performed.

You need to specify the drive letter of the 500GB to use Fixmbr. If there is no drive letter, because of the problem, get a floppy disk drive and a bootdisk floppy such as Win98SE. Disconnect all drives except for the 500GB one.

Boot the floppy and use the command: Fdisk /mbr.

This will write a new MBR into Sector 0.

[benn11]

If you are not sure with using the above mentioned procudure, boot with a live CD you can download the program here >>. This allows you to access your Hard disk and check whether you can find the problem before you format your PC...

[LSmith4285]

I am getting a very similar problem to the OP, I am getting the "InitDiskError device 1 cannot read from sector 0" error when I use the ultimate boot disk tools.

This is a brand new 160gb western digital disk, I tried to restore an image I took from the old HD and now I am getting this.

I tried going into the recovery console but it says it can't find any hard disks, it does however show in the BIOs, if anyone has any ideas I'd be really grateful.

Cheers

[HVAC888]

I am getting a very similar problem to the OP, I am getting the "InitDiskError device 1 cannot read from sector 0" error when I use the ultimate boot disk tools.

This is a brand new 160gb western digital disk, I tried to restore an image I took from the old HD and now I am getting this.

I tried going into the recovery console but it says it can't find any hard disks, it does however show in the BIOs, if anyone has any ideas I'd be really grateful.

Cheers

I googled "InitDiskError" and it doesn't sound good. There is program called spinrite that may help recover data.

You may also want to try a partitioning tool such as Partition Magic or even better, Acronis Disk Director, to rewrite the partition table.

[interinfinity]

Try opening up the disk manager and making sure everything in there checks out

Just right click on "my computer" and go to manage