Guest Poldie Posted September 30, 2007 Posted September 30, 2007 I booted from my XP SP2 CD to try and perform scandisk on a drive. (I couldn't defrag it because there was some problem or other which Windows suggested I run scandisk to fix). The PC loaded up the drivers etc, but then the PC rebooted. Great. Even better, now, my other 300gb drive is showing as "not initialized" and "unallocated" in the Computer Management tool. This has happened before, and I fixed it by initializing it, then running some freeware app to recover files, which it sort of did, although it couldn't get everything back, but it was mostly ok. I have no idea why this happens. It doesn't seem to be something which I can find references to on the net. My PC is ok apart from this, and I have no idea why it happens. I have two physical drives. One is partitioned as C: and D:, which are fine, and the other is F:. So my questions are: 1) Why does this happen? 2) Which app do you recommend I use to recover the data? 3) Is there a way of simply `initializing` the drive and have it rebuild the various structures it needs to see the data which is manifestly still perfectly intact on the drive? Cheers!
Guest Joseph Conway [MSFT] Posted October 4, 2007 Posted October 4, 2007 RE: Recovering an uninitialized NTFS hard disk 1. This happens typically from hardware failure (or imminent failure). It can also be caused by misconfiguration on the system in regards to the layout of the drives. 2. Data recovery is done by several agencies online, I know that a lot of people have had success with OnTrack 3.Typically if you have a drive thats become unitialized, you can choose to reinitialize it and its fine. If the disk structures are being re-written (such as the MBR and boot sector), then you would be in the data loss scenario you are seeing now. Joseph W. Conway, MCSE Windows Server Group This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
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