Hi guys and gals,

please help a newbie out

I had a power outage the other day and when it was restored my external USB driven Western Digital WD2500 IDE HDD had lost it's file system format. At least that what Windows XP Pro disk manager says (it used to be NTFS). It also says that the drive has 100% free space and is healthy, yet the drive was almost full. I tried GetDataBack for NTFS and it gets to 55% and then fails to read any sectors after that. I tried making an image with the same program with the same result at 55%. On trying numerous other data recovery software it seems that the problem is with the partitioning as some report my drive to be only 128GB instead of the 232GB. When I try any sort of partition repair software it says my drive's partition is OK.
I have tried the software people's support but have virtually got no response so I'm hoping someone here might be able to point me in the right direction. I am currently unemployed and can't really afford to take it to a data recovery place especially if there is something I can do myself with your guidance.

Regards,
Richard

Hello,

U are probably running XP sp1, that means it doesn't have LBA48 support. This means it recognizes HDDs with larger capacities, but cannot access the space over 128G. Even worse, if it wants to write to the first sector over 128G, it will write LBA0, that is the MBR. This results in losing partition information and probably the beginning of the first partition.
So it is critical that U have SP2 installed when having large drives like this one.

regards,
pepe

hi pepe,
thanks for the quick reply but I have a genuine copy of XP Pro SP2 running and all my other 9 HDD's are as big or bigger than the failed drive and they are all running fine.


Regards,
Richard

Try to check the drive in MHDD.
It will show if the drive has HPA turned on and U can reset it also to the native max LBA address.

pepe

Hi,

it must be the limit of the bios tries in a PC more recent than probably it goes to read the 250 GB

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Can someone send me a copy of MHDD please? All files I try to download are only 2.8kb and don't extract or run

Please send to richardcran@gmail.com

TIA

Richard

Translator corrupted or lots of bad UNC

I have seen this at least twice. On both occasions, they were Western Digital drives in an external housing. One of the housings was generic and the other, LaCie.

WD2500 suddenly became 128GB.

I'll see if I can dig up the housings again - I'm fairly certain it's a serious bug within the firmware of the USB device.

your an absolute CHAMPION Odiferous

I went out and bought a new USB box and... whalla!!! my drive is back as though nothing had happened

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU