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 !!

Hi,

I suggest to seek for professional help.
Your case is easy for a pro, it should be cheap and safe. (At this point)
But if you play more, the price will be higher and higher, you can do more harm for your data.

Janos

Thanx. But I've been having the bad sector problem for almost a month now. Initially I thought of purchasing a new hard drive & copy the data. But somehow, the hard disk was corrected automatically & I was able to reinstall my OS. But the problem was that, one improper shutdown would lead me to reinstallation of the OS again. I've reinstalled the OS almost 10 times at the span of one month. I was running it smoothly for almost 2 weeks now, without any improper shutdown, & now this problem has occured because of another improper shutdown. I'm really concerned why all my partitions are recognized as free, when they are almost full with data.

your drive is failing, you can see that.
The fs gets corrupted because of bad sectors.

Does this mean that I've lost my whole data all of a sudden ?

You got the answer allready !

+++

I'm not a DR guy, but the consensus appears to be that your drive has many bad sectors, and that this number will grow quickly.

If you don't want to go for professional recovery, then you will need to clone your drive as quickly as possible.

DD_rescue is a free multipass cloning utility that understands how to skip over bad sectors. It can also clone your drive in reverse. You can configure it to clone the easy sectors on the first pass, and the more difficult ones on subsequent passes.

http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/

You might also like to examine the SMART report for reallocated, pending, and uncorrectable sectors.

HD Sentinel (DOS / Windows / Linux):
http://www.hdsentinel.com/

HDDScan for Windows:
http://hddscan.com/

You could also examine the partition table and boot sector with Microsoft's Sector Inspector:
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/SecInspect.zip

Extract the above archive to the one folder and execute the SIrun.bat file. The procedure will generate a report file named SIout.txt.

I never understand why people do this! Even more so when clients tell me the added partitions were for regular backups of data on primary partitions!

I agree that you likely have bad sectors, and if you do not want professional service then I think you first need to understand some of the causes of these damaged sectors because this could also be a early sign of more serious damage. If bad sectors are appearing because of a weak or failing mechanical head then it could potentially fail during any attempted cloning, recovery of other DIY attempt.

Most companies offer a free evaluation which will confirm the problem and its seriousness. Maybe this is something you should at least consider.