Help! Harddisk went blank

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calosIII

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i use 2 hd, a 40gb WD as primary and the secondary (no OS) a 20gb maxtor. and now the maxtor has gone blank on me. empty, 100% free space.
this happened. i was watching a video on the maxtor when suddenly the video stuttered then hanged. no response fm the keyboard or mouse. only thing i could do was press reset on my casing. when the pc restarted it automatically gave the message to checkdisk the maxtor drive (f:\) so i let it. but it got stuck at some stage (forgot which stage), no response for a long time, more than 1 hour.
so again i pressed reset button on the case and now in windows the drive is empty. diskmgmt says its healthy but 100% free space and unformatted. before it was around 70% full. this harddisk has never given me pblms before.

i use win xp sp2 and the maxtor was formatted in fat32 before it want blank.

i'm guessing the data is still there but somehow windows can't read it. can someone help me on this?

thanks...
 
try using undelete or some software to try recover it unless you fully formatted it might not be there and you might have to take it to recovery center to get it recovered for $1000 or more
 
i've tried using Restoration. its worked for me before. but this time though some files are there, some have messed up names. i'll try see what Undelete brings up.
and since there are lots of data on the disk i was wondering if there was a way to make windows able to read the harddisk normally again. seems a lot less messy than recovering everything through an undelete program.
still appreciate the suggestion.
 
Try attaching your Maxtor drive, to some other healthy system and see if the drive is detected there. If not, then the only way to gain access to the data on your Maxtor drive is to use a recovery software. Try FAT Data Recovery Software. You can use the demo version to see whether the software is able to recover your files or not. Never install the recovery software on the drive from which you want to recover data, also never save any data on the same drive from which you are recovering data. Hope this helps you!
 
hi. thanks for the replies. sorry it took me so long to reply back. been away for a bit. just wanted to share what i've done so far.
i've used the diagnostic tool from seagate website, Seatools. i tried the short test and it wouldn't run because it detected bad sector/block/something. so i ran the long test which checks every cluster and sure enough it detected about 30 bad sectors/blocks/something. i'm still not sure how to repair or if its possible to repair. it remains that diskmgmt.msc detects the hd as unformatted, 100% free space and healthy.
next i tried 3 free recovery softwares.
1. Restoration - seems like it only detects stuff that have been deleted. so i can't get back all my data because it wasn't deleted, just couldn't be read by windows.
2. Recuva - couldn't read the hd at all. said that there was formatting error on my f:\.
3. PC Inspector - finally i got back back my data, but after a few tries. had to mess around with the fat options. seems that files that were on the bad sectors can only be recovered if i select fat2.

i'm not saying that any of these programs are better than the other, just saying what worked in my case.
next i'm trying to repair/recover/whatever the bad sectors. than last step maybe a reformat. at least if anything goes wrong i already have a backup of my files.
 
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