HDD help!

[BUMFISH]

My original hard drive crashed (it wouldn't boot up at all), which has now been replaced with a temporary drive until I get the original fixed.

I have plugged the old drive in as master on the secondary IDE cable. The new, smaller hard drive is master on the primary, and my CD ROM is slave on the primary.

BIOS recognises the old drive, as does Windows XP. The drive however, according to both Windows and Partition Magic 7, is 'unallocated'????? WTF???:eek: What does this mean?

The old drive has two partitions on it..... C:\ was 5 GB with Windows, Office etc... and the second was games, MP3's etc of 25GB.

Have I lost all my data???

All help greatly appreciated :)
Cheers,
Robbo

[handyandyuk]

You may find it has something to do with LASTDRIVE.
There is a command in the boot sequence usually something like LASTDRIVE = E, which tells the system how may drives it is reasonably looking for. You might try looking at the boot files using system info and see what it says. try changing LASTDRIVE to G and see what happens.
Just remember to change it back to the original when you're finished.

[fobotcso]

Maybe:mad:

But don't give up yet. It is normally advised that you don't mix HDDs and CD-ROMs on the same IDE interface cable.

So, first off, put the old HDD on the Primary IDE cable as slave and make sure that you change the jumper setting to "Slave".

Why not leave out the CD-ROM until you have sorted out your problem?

Make sure that the IDE cable has not come lose on the Motherboard. With all this fiddling about, sometimes the connectors work loose.

If Partition Magic can see the old drive, check the properties and ensure that it is not still "Active". You can use PM to assign drive letters to the the Partitions. Or you can use XP's Computer Management.

I recently rescued data from a "dead" HDD by fitting an identical IDE Interface/controller card. It worked because the cause of death was the card itself not the hardware of the disk.

Let us know how you get on.