HDD turned RAW

[peekaboo]

My Seagate 7200.8 250Gb Sata HD suddenly turned RAW.
I cannot access the drive and I get the "do you want to format the drive?" window (see attachment).
I was playing around with my CPU multiplier and FSB bios settings and when I was done, I set everything back to "auto" in the bios and booted up. Checked the HD and could not access it anymore.

I have lots of data on the HD that I want.
What are my options?

Thanks.

[glc]

Data recovery software.

Lesson learned - do NOT play with overclocking without a backup............

[peekaboo]

Yup.
I'm guessing the fact that I kept the other multipliers on auto allowed them to increase when they really shouldn't and messed up my sata hd.
Fortunately, it was only one drive that was corrupted.

I recovered all the data using "File Scavenger".
"RecoverMyFiles" takes forever to scan and then lists the files with random names. Not a good option for 250 Gb of files. I wonder if RecoverMyFiles is better than File Scavenger when the data has been deleted and overwritten.

Anyway, lesson learned.

[glc]

Different packages work better than others depending on exactly what's wrong. It's very difficult to say that one is better than another. However, if I had to pick a "best" I'd have to go with Ontrack Easy Recovery. It's also the most expensive one.

[liambl]

Originally Posted by peekaboo I was playing around with my CPU multiplier and FSB bios settings and when I was done, I set everything back to "auto" in the bios and booted up. Checked the HD and could not access it anymore.

Wait, did you actually change the settings and then save and exit the BIOS setup and boot back into Windows?

[peekaboo]

Originally Posted by liambl Wait, did you actually change the settings and then save and exit the BIOS setup and boot back into Windows?

I saved the settings and booted back into Windows, checked the temps and the cpu speed and decided to return to stock settings and play with it some more another time (after I get a better cpu fan).
Changed back to stock settings and booted back into windows.
That was enough to corrupt my HDD (which is not even the one my OS is installed on).

[liambl]

Problem with overclocking using the FSB is that I believe is also changes the system bus speed, which is what everyting else is clocked off. So when you increase the FSB, it also increases the clock of the southbridge which increases the clock of the SATA and IDE busses to a point where corruption occurs.

[peekaboo]

What a strange corruption though. Just RAW?!
Could have been worse though. I could have damaged all my components.
What kind of stupid setting is "auto" if it messes up other speeds? I thought it would just keep everything else at stock.
BTW, how else would I overclock? CPU multiplier?

[glc]

If you are going to overclock, you disconnect everything except an OS drive and you make sure you have a backup of that. When the overclock is tested stable, then you can reconnect other drives, etc.