Oh great Gurus and Gods of the OS - I humbly petition thee....

Duron 900
Abit K7a Lite mobo
512 RAM
XP Pro
40G HD partitioned into 2 20G partitions with XP Pro twice for dual boot
40G HD with files only - no OS.

The K7a has a nasty habit of losing touch with the hard drives. It simply cannot find them, which results in a reset of the CMOS and re-install of XP as the only solution. This happens FREQUENTLY.

I keep all my files on a second 40G hard drive and it never bothered them - until now.

Disconnected all but the main HD and 1 CD to prep for reinstall and it booted right up - did not have to reinstall XP.

When I connected 2nd HD ( Drive E) is when I noticed the problem.

E will not work corectly. Here are the symptoms:

During boot - BIOS does not see the E disc - says "none" where it is supposed to be.

During XP boot it goes to a blue screen that says disk errors on E and then starts checking - reports segments 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 172, 173, 174, 175 damaged.

So, BIOS does not see it - but XP does

In "my computer" - double click on icon to access files and get message the files are corrupted. Do it again and get message that the drive is not formatted and asks if I want to format. Mesages alternate

Right click for properties - pie chart blue (used space) is 100% full (still had 12G open before).

Try to check for errors - no response

Try to scan for defragging - cannot access.

Go to Disk Management - disk is 100% empty and files healthy. (NTFS) ?? Contradiction?


Have not tried to format - will lose a lot of work that cannot be replaced - most has backup - but will lose a couple G of not replaceable files. Not to mention a tad over 200 aircraft zip files being stored for frequent re-installs.

I suspicion that the disk registry files are jacked somehow.

I am desperately looking for a way to salvage the files.

Anyone got the knowhow?

Thanks in advance.

Oso

BTW - All the problems with the HDs getting lost was started way before I went with dual boot.

Actually,you don't have to have an OS on the disk to access it.Go to "Control Panel",then "Administrative Tools" ,then "Computer Management".In "Computer Management" select "Disk Management",you can then "import" the disks so XP can see them.
You can recover the data,but you'll probably have to take it to a professional so,you'll have to decide how important the data is and if its worth your money.