Hi all I am using P3 Asus motherboard My motherboard does not support larges drives more last year I bought a drive of 160gb but my computer could not recongnize it than what I did is i took my disk to office the computer supports large drives so i used pt mg 8 to format the disk then took it back to my home & finally my computer recoginze it and is shows 152gb for me to storage. Now the problems comes Recently I have been storing more files to 130gb left space 22gb & suddenly my drives occur with lost clusters. When i open up part magic 7 at home & scan the drive it shows to error of lost clusters, & i have done all the scanning fix errors but still I can't access to my files. I have R-studio to recover files when I open it shows my drive of 152gb & shows 128gb does it mean my computer limit to 128gb only & when exceeding that 128gb lost clusters will occur? I used to R-Studio to recover 1 file for testing but I dont like it cause it does not recover with file names at all although i have select to recover file name from tags. What shall I do to fix the lost cluster? Any advice for me brother & sisters. Thanks alot for reading this long message Sorry for my poor english.

Lost clusters can be signs of a failing hard drive. Run the free diagnostics from the appropriate drive maker's site to check the status.

Trying to trick the BIOS to recognize the full size of the drive by using a partitioning and formatting on another machine is probably the cause of the problem. I would not trust the data that was supposedly written in the extra area.

thanks for reply i have done disk diagnostics already all passed. is there any cluster repair program out there?

If your bios doesn't see it you should probably connect it to an ATA controller card that will see it. Also, I think you need SP2 in order for XP to properly use the drive.

But do this IDE Controller cards can use with internal drives? so this IDE controller cards can support drives with large capacity for old motherboards?if I am not wrong. The drive I am using is internal & connected to my secondary drive as slave. I have three drives in my computer Primary Master/Slave Secondary M(CDRW)/Slave (160gb drive) Can anyone suggest which program is best to recover back the files with names?

The ATA controller cards are designed exactly for your situation--an internal drive with a capacity to large for the bios to see. I'm not sure about recovery software. I'd think it'd be difficult to recover once windows has marked the data as lost. Or is it just marking sectors as 'bad'? That's something different and it would be possible to fix, after you've added the ATA card and SP2 (if necessary).