Data loss concern. Please Help !!

[gantlet]

I have a Seagate 250 GB SATA Hard drive. I've partitioned it into 6 partitions. I've had bad sector problems with my hard drive. Yesterday I was working on my computer & I restarted when it was frozen at some point. But when I restarted I got the "Disk error has occurred. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart message". So I booted using my Windows XP CD in a plan to reinstall my OS. It detected my harddrive & all my partitions, but to my horror, all the partitions had full space left. Have all my data gone suddeny. Will the whole hard disk get formatted automatically still showing all the active partitions. I'm confused. PLEASE HELP !!

[Alexii]

MFT gone wild it seems. Bad sectors can do that. Take it to a pro is my N1 suggestion. If u are looking at DIY solution only - u can try cloning ur drive onto another drive and then run logical scan software on the clone to get the data back. Software like R-Studio, Recover My Files , File scavenger , Easus etc.

[granaryloaf]

I may be wrong here but I don't think the standard XP installer will tell you what space is available on a partition?

Any one?

Relax though, your data is still there providing you do not all any FS utilities such as Chkdsk or similar to make any changes you should find it easily with commercial software.

[Alexii]

BTW , when i said clone i ment sector to sector clone. Not a smart MFT using ghost.