Question : Problem: Emergency help needed with partition problem

I have a 120GB Maxtor hard drive. It has no OS installed on it but I used it as a large storage drive. I hooked it up earlier to my Win2k3 machine to take a look at what was on it and to try copying some stuff from it. Initially Win2k3 didn't add the drive (it didn't assign it a letter), so through the disk manager I assigned it a drive letter of X:. When I went into Explorer, there it was and the drive worked perfectly. I copied some stuff off without issue, shut down the machine, and removed the Maxtor HDD.

I just went to hook it up again a little while ago to finish moving stuff over from it, but it's not showing up correctly now. Win2k3 assigns it a drive letter of X: automatically, but now it shows the partitions wrong:

1. Approximately 37GB worth of space is shown as the X: drive. When I try to view it in Explorer, I get the "not formatted" message.
2. The rest of the drive is shown as unallocated space!

This is really really bad and I'm worried that the data is toast now. I didn't change the partition table at all so I don't understand how this could have happened. I tried connecting it to another machine (Windows XP) and the results are the same... one smaller partition and the rest shows as unallocated space.

I really need help with this... does anyone have any idea what went wrong here? Is there any way I can fix this or somehow get all of the files off this drive?


Edit: It was partitioned as NTFS and used with a Windows XP system originally (if that helps any).

Answer : Problem: Emergency help needed with partition problem

I would recommend Zero Assumption Recovery. It's worked well for me in similar situations. Www.z-a-recovery.com.

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