Dear gurus,

Two weeks ago I started up my computer, which suddenly crashed beyond repair. I bought a new one; Pentium DualCore E5200, 2.50 GHz, 3Gb ram.

I'm running the same XP installation as I had on my old computer, but with one big change: this one won't recognize my old hard drive. It's a 250 Gb Samsung S2514N, 7200 rpm / 8M / Pata disk. Hooked up to the only IDE cable that was connected to my mobo, set the drive as master and the DVD player as slave.

Tried swapping master/slave around, only connected the hdd, nothing helped... At first it only saw 32 Gb, but then I realized I had misplaced the jumpers (quite confusing) and after that my 250 gigs were back again.

Computer Management can only see that a disk is connected, nothing else. BIOS sees a 250 gb hard drive, as do Disk Management and Partition Magic.

The weirdest thing is this: last weekend my friend dropped by, and could see both partitions, including data, when we ran a kubuntu live cd. If it's all really still there, I really want to keep that data. Lot of photos and other personal stuff on there. Tried mounting the partitions from there today, but couldn't mount my new hard drive for some reason. Argh.

Also ran Spinrite to see if that would do any good, but also to no avail.

I'm completely out of options now... any help would be greatly appreciated! (:

I assuem the old drive is added as a data drive to you new PC
and the new PC is booting from some other (sata) disk

Try scanning the old drive with something like Restorer2000 or R-Studio
It should be able to find the files

Else (with more experince) you could probably sort out the partition table and boot sectors

.

thank u

You assume correctly.

If it does find the files, can I copy them to my other disk, so I can format it?


Alright, if all else fails, I will come back form more info and howto's.

Thanks for now! (:

One other thing, I fear that because the jumpers had been placed before to limit to 32Gb, it now created a 32gb big partition... while there ought to be two equally sized partitions of about 120 gb.

Damn this. ;(

Ooh, you're the man, xsoliman! Niiiiiceeeeeeee!

Although it seems that not all folders and files can be restored, or maybe that's due to the fact that it also restores previously deleted files? E.g. download albums now contain both the ~INCOMPLETE files and the tracks themselves. Odd?

Now let's hope it will be able to restore the second partition as well, the first one was the least important (downloaded music).

Thanks so much dude.