Missing Hard Drive after failed XP Install

[spiritual123]

Pls pardon my ignorance/arrogance, I always think I know it all, but I am sure someone will help me here !


I attempted to install XP on a system which runs two hard drives (C: has ME and 6GB, D: is a 60 GB with the best part of 40 GB data on it).
Somehow the install failed (it told me that a dll was missing after a restart), but it gave me the option to restart under Windows ME, which I did.
The problem is now that Windows does not recognise D: anymore... Various utilities used show the second disk is present and that the data is still there, but I simply cannot access it. It looks like either my FAT or the partition got corrupted by the XP install.

My main question is : I know I can recover the data bit by bit, but having a 6GB primary disk is not going to help me much when I want to recover about 7 times the amount...Is there anyway I can either rebuild the partition or FAT (if this is the problem) and recover access to the hard drive ?

Thanks !

 

[ekÆsine]

i would try to see if knoppix can access your data first (http://www.knoppix.com/). download their CD image and burn it. boot with the CD. use knoppix to copy your files to another storage device. if this doesn't work use a winME boot disk (bootdisk.com) with DOS on it. enter FDISK /MBR at the prompt to fix your master boot record.

as a last resort slave your hard disk and use another hard disk which has a running operating system on it. do not install any software or OS on the corrupted disk to prevent overwriting the data. use a data recovery software like ontrack easy recovery to get back your data.