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Data Recovery Emergency/Fdisk Mayhem

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Aaaah!

Can someone give me a clue as to what I should do next? I have a PC, with two hard drives, one 3Gb one and one 8Gb one... I had installed ME on the computer and had it working perfectly, but then I decided to remove it and return to SE (just to see if the performance was any better). I'm not normally prone to cak handedness, but I've done something bad this time...

So... I left ME, and re-started with the startup disk. The computer booted to DOS, and I used Fdisk, and said yes to large disk support, and created a single partition (or so I thought) on the "main" drive (hoping to leave the data on the other drive intact). I then formatted the main drive... I then reinstalled windows ME (don't ask.... I'd lost the SE disk).

Problem: Explorer says the drive only seems to be 1Gb in size. Also, when I restart windows, when trying to access the other drive, I can only see 156Kb worth of space, and a few corrupted folders, and files with really weird names (full of odd characters) (this is on the 3Gb disk). I also (and this could be a clincher) CAN'T allocate the second larger drive a letter (if you look via System Settings), UNLESS I make it removable - though I still see gibberish.

What is going on here? I had thought that the 8gb drive was the slave and the computer was booting off the 3gb drive. Say I got them mixed up, and I now have two primary paritions on both drives, would that cause a problem? Could this be why ME can't allocate a drive letter to the second drive?

If I wanted to recover as much data as possible from both drives (looking "beyond" the formatted areas) can anyone recommend a recovery tool (pref. freeware, or shareware)?

Any help would be much appreciated...

-Ben
 
it SEEMS that ME is the porblem , it sounds like the 3 gig is your boot drive right
I would start by fdisk/mdr both drives and see how thing looks this does not remove data and if it is still missed up then format the first drive and try again gunthnp
Have you ever woken up and realized you where not alive.
 
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