Where did mt HDD Data Go?!

[mrstarface]

Bought a new mobo so had to reinstall winxp from scratch - everything worked fine except for my 3rd HDD (attached via a PCI IDE card) is now only showing in windows as being 1 gig big (rather than 60gig) which coincidentally was the amount of free space on it!

Windows says the drive is not formatted and can only "see" the blank part of the drive not the data in there.

Help - is there anything I can do to get windows to see the drive properly? I've tried reinstalling the IDE card, attaching the drive to one of the mobo IDE connectors but same thing happens.

The HDD is a Maxtor one and windows sees it as a SCSI drive which I believe is a side-effect of the Nforce IDE drivers (I have a MSI K7N2 mobo).

All drivers for everything/bios etc are bang up to date.

This is my main drive for data storage and dont know what I#ll do if I've lost 60 gigs worth :(

[TheMajor]

Windows displays SCSI because it's a PCI card IDE controller I think.

Go to disk manager or download a good partitioning program to take a look at your disk
(Partition Magic is very good)

[mrstarface]

I've got Partition Magic but it shows the disk as the wrong size as well, is there a specific function on it I should be using?

[TheMajor]

right click the partition and select "Check for errors" or someting

[mrstarface]

It says no errors found but obviously its lying!

[TheMajor]

there's no unallocated space displayed in partition magic?(looks gray)

[mrstarface]

Nope no Gray Space there but when I go to Partition Info it does detect errors but give me no option to correct them?

[TheMajor]

i had this problem a few years ago..
DAMN i cannot remember how I fixed it

sorry

[TheMajor]

wait..I think in the BIOS there's an option to detect drives or something..maybe you should take a look there

[holocube]

Yeah, try auto-detecting the drive in the bios, the option should be in basic cmos features or suchlike and will list each of your drives. Select the drive in question and proceed to it's properties section, from here there should be an option to auto-detect the drive's properties which will then be reported for the OS during bootup.

[mrstarface]

I dont think I can see the crive in the bios settings as its not attached to the ide connectors on the mobo but through a pci card which isnt detected until after the bios screen vanishes

[TheMajor]

yes..you're right I think.
have you tried putting it in another slot?

[glc]

What does XP's Disk Manager have to say about the drive? Have you run Maxtor's Powermax diagnostics on it yet?

[holocube]

Sorry, didn't read all the original post.

What is the PCI IDE extension card that you have? It may be too old for the HDD. Try connecting this HDD as slave on the main IDE chain and see if Windows recognises it correctly without the card (you can check it in the bios this way also).