Hi Everyone,

OK - I had some computer problems recently (I think caused by a defective Seagate 1.5TB drive (failed badly)). I also have a 500GB IDE hard drive divided into 4 partitions (which appears to be working fine (no clicking or smoke). Somehow the partitions disappeared on the 500GB, I managed to recover two using Partition Commander 10. However the two others are showing as unallocated space and RAW. I have run every file recovery software program I could find from TestDisk to Recuva etc. none of which seem to "see" any data on the missing partitions. When running TestDisk it shows lots of partitions including one for Macs! I have not formatted or saved or defragmented etc. so I believe the data should still be there. I run a dual boot system XP and Vista (neither system restore worked). I therefore have the following questions...

What could have caused this situation?
Why could I recover two but not all the partitions?
Why does the recovery software not see any files?
Is there a way to rebuild the two damaged partitions (I was thinking of a quick format) to better facilitate the file recovery process?
Could this be a problem with heads and sectors?

All of my "IT" friends are claiming ignorance of MFT's, Partition Tables and file recovery (including putting the 1.5TB hard drive in the freezer and recovering 100% of the lost data (worked like a charm)) so I am hoping someone may be able to help via the interweb!

Also, as Doug mentioned, but I already assumed you knew. THe drive needs to be a slave in a working computer, and the recovered files need to be placed on an alternative drive. If you are attempting to recover the data on an active, booted drive, or are trying to recover the files back to the same drive you are trying to located them on you have probably destroyed your data that way.

From your "language" in the previous posts I received the feeling that you already had your drive hooked up like this. I hope that is the case.

My original post, before it got erase mentioned this. I'm not sure if my second post did.

This post has been edited by appleoddity: Jun 21 2009, 01:33 PM