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Four partitions just disappeared

mal - Mar 21, 2004

		mal		Mar 21, 2004
			It's really not my day. I'm in the process of finally transferring all of my junk from my old PC to my newish one. All had been going well until it came to a restart of the target machine. Only 2 of the first drives 6 partitions were showing up after the restart. Partition Magic was able to recover one of them straight away, but the others remain elusive. I've since bought some recovery software and it seems to find all the files OK; I've just got to get a new drive to recover to. It's going to take a while, but it should all work out. I'm wondering what could have caused it? Anyone got any ideas?

		Alexvrb		Mar 21, 2004
			It's probably those damn space aliens again. What the heck did you need 6 partitions for anyway?

		mal		Mar 21, 2004
			I've got that many partitions mainly to keep things organised on the 200GB disc. The partitions are: C: Win 98 D: Win 2k E: Stuff (sad but true ) F: Music G: Sega H: Video I've gone and bought a new 200GB drive to recover the whole thing to. It's going to be messy, but it will be worth it.

		it290		Mar 21, 2004
			What type of motherboard is your newer machine using?

		mal		Mar 21, 2004
			Asus A7N8X-E deluxe.

		mal		Mar 22, 2004
			No one has any ideas?

		antime		Mar 23, 2004
			How did you do the transfer? Plug the old HD into the new machine? Did you use any special software? Did you double the size of the HD using Ghost? Are you using BlackICE...?

		mal		Mar 23, 2004
			I did it across the small network that I have at home. All I did was drag and drop from one directory on one machine to another directory on the other. Now that I'm attempting to recover to a new drive, I'm beginning to think that perhaps HD temperature may be a factor. Just having one sitting out of the case and recovering (writing) files generates quite a bit of heat. I had the two of the same drives in adjacent bays. Perhaps sustained writing over a number of hours got things a little too hot.

		antime		Mar 23, 2004
			It's a possibility, in which case I recommend you scan all files for corruption. If your drives have SMART enabled see if they have logged any problems.

		mal		Mar 23, 2004
			I'm hoping that corruption won't be a problem, but I'm not banking on it. I have tested a few RAR archives that were on there and they've passed OK.

		it290		Mar 23, 2004
			Whoops, sorry I took so long to reply. You aren't/weren't using the NVIDIA IDE driver were you?

		Alexvrb		Mar 23, 2004
			I always try and space out my HDs, and have an intake fan sucking in cool air right over them. I don't dual boot, nor do I ever plan to, so plain old folders are how I organize things. Anyway, this sounds pretty messy... I hope you can recover your stuff. Err, and your other partitions too. My friend recently had a HD die off and lost a bunch of stuff, he was about to be pissed until he realized I had a lot of that stuff archived on my machine too.

		schi0249		Mar 23, 2004
			That NVIDIA IDE driver is pure crap. I made the mistake of installing it when I setup my new machine. I wiped it and reinstalled everything minus that.

		it290		Mar 23, 2004
			Yup. I have an Nforce2 mobo as well, and the NVIDIA IDE driver has wiped out the whole thing in the past. I'll never use it again.

		mal		Mar 23, 2004
			It could well be the nvidia driver. I'll check. What's the alternative?

		it290		Mar 23, 2004
			Just use the default Windows driver, and when you install the Nvidia chipset drivers, select no when it asks you if you want to install the IDE driver. If you've already installed it, you'll have to search for an uninstaller, I believe Nvidia may have one on their site somewhere. Supposedly they've fixed most of the problems, but I still don't trust it. If you're using an outdated Nforce2 driver set, that could very well be the problem, lots of people had data wiped because of this bug.

		mal		Mar 23, 2004
			I had a look at the drivers in Device Manager and they all appear to be Microsoft drivers. *shrug* Thanks to everyone for your help so far.

		gameboy900		Mar 23, 2004
			Uninstall the full Nforce2 driver set in the control panel. Then in the Device Manager find the IDE driver and use it's uninstall feature. That should get rid of it for good. Reboot and you should be prompted that new hardware was found. Let it install the MS IDE driver. Reboot. Then install the Nforce2 drivers minus the IDE driver. That's what I did and it fixed my problem. For me it broke my Radeon severly. I could not play any 3D games at all till I removed the damn thing.