Hard Drive wiped out...

Neosec

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Reposting as previous was deleted. I'm guessing because of a link I inserted... link was removed... If there is any other issue that breaks the rules please let me know and I will remove it.

Looking for some help as to why this might have happened and how to prevent it in the future.
The system is a Windows XP box with an Intel MB. It is used for video editing only. The system had 4 HDDs, two 500 GB, and two 1 TB. Since we were running out of space and wanted a solution for inexpensive archiving I opted to install a Trayless hot swap mobile rack and bought a WD 2TB hard drive to offload some of the old video. Installation went pretty well though I was out of SATA power cable so bought an adapter. Also the MB didn't have any free SATA connectors left due to a couple eSATA ports. So I removed one of the 1TB drives and connected the mobile rack to the MB where it was connected. I also swapped the new SATA power adapter to the system disk (a 500GB) so I could use a proper SATA power supply line (with 3.3v orange wire) on the new mobile rack.
I fired up the system and all was well. With the 2TB drive in the mobile rack I initalized the drive and performed a quick format, also named the drive "Green 2TB A" as it was a WD green drive (intended to sit on a shelf for archiving). So far so good.
What happened next is the problem.
The 2TB drive was removed and the previously removed 1TB drive was put into the mobile rack. Windows now showed the drive in the mobile rack as 1 TB of free space on a drive named Green 2TB A. Apparently the system wiped out the partition table and kept the name of the previous drive in the mobile rack. ? ?
I'm currently working at recovering the drive using a partition recovery program. Seem to be working. I'm using USB - SATA adapters recovering from the 1TB onto the 2TB.
Any idea why this happened and how to prevent it from happening again? The mobile rack says it -Hot Swap- does Windows XP support hot swap? I've swapped out dozens of drives over the years nad never seen anything like this before.

TIA
 
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Yes. The two drives mentioned above have been removed and are now in my possession. I accessed them using a USB adapter and the 1TB drive shows up as blank. When I scan it with a partition recovery program I can see all the folders but the system says it's empty.
 
Sounds like the ntfs file system had gotten corrupted. Did you stop the drive before you removed it? I'm not sure if your sata controller has the hot swap option available for XP

What the name brand and model number of your mother board?
 
It's not my PC it's a relatives... I just have the drives here now. I don't believe the drives were stopped before swapping but I wasn't there. I'll have to check tomorrow on the model of the MB I do know it's an Intel about 7 yrs old. More to come...
 
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