Hello,

I've got a 2 month old Seagate 160Gb SATA drive running off a SATA controller card in my PC. It has a single partition and is formatted as NTFS. It's not my boot disk, and contains my entire ripped music collection. The PC runs WinXP SP2 which is contained on a separate 60Gb IDE drive.

The PC locked up while playing back the music files. After a reboot I ran CHKDSK from Windows - which stalled half way through examining the disc. All I could do was reboot the machine. Upon rebooting, the BIOS recognises the disk and reports the correct size, but once into Windows, the disk shows up in control panel, and has the correct drive letter, but is reporting as 0 bytes size, 0 bytes used.

Can anyone give me guidance on which of your applications would be the best to start with ?

Thanks.

Operating system / Service Pack: Windows XP SP2

Size of subject harddisk: 160Gb

Hello,

First make sure that you don't have any large disk (> 120Gb) issues. Check for more info at http://www.48bitlba.com.
Once that has been cleared up, you'd probably do best to make sure no more disk writes are performed to the problem disk. The fact that chkdsk has run is not good, and lessens the chances for a full recovery. You should try to recover some files from the partition with the iRecover demo to see if that works. If so, iRecover is the way to go.

Regards,
Tom

I've run Irecover on the disk, and after just over a day of scanning it comes back with about three quarters of the file structure that was on the disk, but all of the files are showing as 0 bytes.... apart from a handful of files reporting as 96Gb each. The original disk was only 160Gb, so these values are wrong as well.

On the original scan of the disk, the only thing it seemed to report as being incorrect was the number of sectors.

Any thoughts what to do next ?

Operating system / Service Pack: Windows XP SP2

Size of subject harddisk: 160Gb

>>>First make sure that you don't have any large disk (> 120Gb) issues. Check for more info at http://www.48bitlba.com.<<<

This is important, did you check this?

Regards,
Tom

Yep, I've checked it out and my machine sees it all fine. I ran the suggested tests which it all passed.

I was using the drive for about two months without any problems before this happened, and the drive was brand new at Christmas.

Product you are using: IRecover

Operating system / Service Pack: XP Pro SP2

Size of subject harddisk: 160Gb

Don't know whether it makes any difference, but Irecover correctly identified the drive as NTFS - even though when you look at the properties in Windows is says it is file system RAW.

Product you are using: IRecover

Operating system / Service Pack: XP Pro SP2

Size of subject harddisk: 160Gb

Hi,

"Don't know whether it makes any difference, but Irecover correctly identified the drive as NTFS"

No, iRecover can come up with that pretty easily.

"Yep, I've checked it out and my machine sees it all fine. I ran the suggested tests which it all passed."

These are 48 bit LBA support tests? If so then I guess that's all covered.

"about three quarters of the file structure that was on the disk, but all of the files are showing as 0 bytes.... apart from a handful of files reporting as 96Gb each"

Well, that's really weird. 99 out of 100 times, finding the filenames and their sizes on an NTFS volume is pretty straight forward due to the nature NTFS organizes this information. So I cannot explain that unless we assume the entire MFT was 'nuked'. And that is hard to imagine unless something purposely corrupted the MFT ... Chkdsk ran ... Those files that were listed, what were their names? Not all of them, but did they appear to be valid filenames?

Also, could grab the DiskPatch demo and create a logfile following the steps in the top sticky post?

--
Kind regards,
Joep