Hey guys,

This morning I turned on my computer and nothing.....no display, and no POST beep. Having not done anything to my computer i was shocked! So I opened it up and it seems as though the video card fan was no longer spinning, so I replaced the video card with another spare – still, not display. So after a series of trial and error, i deduced my motherboard had failed on me.

Now the process of moving all my hardware onto a new mobo. The problem now is that, since I was running windows 7, i couldn't just repair windows and let it reinstall windows so that all was well. no, they've decided to make it a lot more complicated to just switch over parts now (as opposed to xp, where i could just hit repair and all was well)

- So I put my 1TB WD10EARS into another computer, it comes up with 'this hard drive needs to be formatted' – here lies the problem. I need the data on this hard drive, its important! Now, I noticed when I check 'disk management' that it only comes up as a 32mb hard drive, not the 1TB that it is, so i assume this is jsut the hard drives back up space or cache (despite it being a 64mb cache drive). I dont know where my data is as its not even coming up.

- I tried using the "HDD Capacity Restore", but for some reason when I go to open the program, it says ' error opening driver' , and i can't see anything. What I am doing is connecting it via a USB hard drive dock, and its also running windows 7. This obviously is an issue, so I was wondering if it should still work?

Is there anyone that can help me with my issue? I really need the data off this hard drive before i turn it in scrap metal for failing on me

Computer specs: (bare in mind, its quite old....purely not for gaming)
AMD Athon 3600
MB: GA-K8N-SLI
HDD: 1TB WD10EARS
VGA: geforce 7600gt

The problem is a bug in the Xpress Recovery BIOS of your Gigabyte motherboard. BIOS has incorrectly truncated the drive after writing a backup of itself to a HPA. You can use HDAT2 to restore the drive's full native capacity.

See this thread:
lost-partition-hitachi-1gb-hdt721010sla360-t15662.html

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

I had the same issue with a wd10EADS. See the image.

Indeed, at the end, after recovery I found the bios mark at the end of the hdd, looking with HxD. As you see I was trying to move (clone) a win XP from a drive to this new 1T one.

I don't know what triggered the bios backup. Perhaps the fact that I unplugged the previous ide hdd letting only this sata hdd. However, after this story, the new hdd works fine in the same hardware config. I think maybe the bios has marked itself as backed up on hdd or something since now the hdd doesn't have the mark anymore at the end of wd. It could be this or the CD-ROM unit plugged on IDE sockets which is seen first by the bios.