Help~! Accessing a new HDD(which is very old)!

[lache13]

"Log File Initialization Error, dirve D:"

Above is the error message I get on winxp when I open "My Computer" after installing an old HDD and then rebooting the PC on demand by winxp. (It said it had to reboot to use a new device.)

While booting, winxp does "scandisk" on drive D and a series of (very large number of) messages saying "lost chain cross-linked at cluster *****. orphan truncated." appears on the screen along with a small number of other messages which I was unable to make out due to the speed at which the messages were showing.

Winxp seems to load up successfully but the above error message appears. When I actually try to access drive D, I only see a single folder named "?$INST$.TMP" which cannot be accessed, and what should be folders (such as "Program Files", "WINDOWS" or "MY DOCUMENTS") show as files with size of only 4KB.

What is puzzling is that when I first connected the HDD to the computer and turned on the machine I could see the contents of the new(?) HDD without any problem. The problem rose after the reboot, and it seems either "installing the new device" part or "scandisk" changed things.. The message "orphan truncated" worries me. Have I lost all the data? Is there a way to bring this HDD to life with my old data intact?

Some additional information..

The "new" HDD is very old, its size is only 1GB and was purchased in 1995 with a Pentium 75 machine with win95 installed. It was later upgraded to win98 and its file system was(still is) FAT32.

The computer I installed the "new" 1GB HDD on is also rather old as it has VIA694 chipset mainboard.

[glc]

Is there a way to bring this HDD to life with my old data intact?

It sounds to me like it had a dynamic drive overlay on it (EZ-Bios or Ontrack Disk Manager) to be fully seen by the Pentium 75 board. Undoing what Scandisk just did to you may not be possible. Your best shot is professional data recovery software.

[lache13]

thx a lot for the reply.
i was feeling rather depressed since i couldn't find any solutions nor anybody with the same problem on the net.
any recommendations on "professional data recovery software"?

[glc]

There is one freebie you can try.

http://www.pcinspector.de/Sites/file...htm?language=1

[systempat]

How, um, valuable are the contents on that ancient (in computer terms) drive? I'm trying to be gentle, but the hardware value of that drive is so small it's negligible. So what are the contents worth to you? If you take it somewhere to attempt a data recovery it will start at around $100.

If the drive is running properly you can do a format and create a partition and have a fresh drive, but at 1 GB, it still isn't much.