Yesterday I flattened a users PC (running NT4.0) and installed Win2K Pro + SP2

The computer had a second IDE Hard DRive in it, which had a single 10GB Partition, and had all his data stored on it. In order to maintain data integrity and to ensure that I didnt accidentally delete this partition at setup, I removed this second hard drive prior to doing the format and install. The data was verified OK before this procedure.

When I had installed OS, and all drivers and updates, I then powered off and popped the 2nd HDD back in the machine. It came up ok, but then when it was logged on as local machine admin account, it said it had made changes and required a reboot. When it came back up again, the second disk had 2 partitions (2GB and 8GB respectively) and these were unreadable (and the computer said unformatted)

we tried the HDD in another machine with NT on, but to no avail.

Does anyone know of any reason why this should have happened? Im mainly a hardware person, and have never experienced this prob before. THe 2nd hard drive is practically brand new, and had no OS of its own installed on it. It was an NTFS single physical partition, and i took all usual precautions when removing it.

If anyone can shed light on this, or can recommend a way to get this data back, I would be most appreciative.

Did you convert the first hard disk to NTFS when you installed Win2K? If you left it as FAT32 it won't recognize the NTFS partition on the other drive.

After you reconnected the second drive and rebooted Win2K probably "found new hardware"
and took control of it. If it altered the partitions you've probably lost the the data.

Go to Disk Management in Win2K and see what it tells you.

For the future I recommend you use FAT 32 for pure data storage - it has lots of advantages.

It doesn't matter what file format W2K (on HD-1 in this case) is, W2K will read ntfs4/ntfs5 or fat32/fat16 regardless.

You 'had' an NT4 data drive formatted as ntfs4. W2K has an irritating habit (design feature!!!) of compulsory conversion of ntfs4 to ntfs5 - whenever it finds it on a drive in the same physical PC. (Bit like a political or religious take-over...?)

And an NT4 system cannot see/access ntfs5 unless it has SP4 or later installed on an NT4 system... But any W2K/XP system should be able to access it (ntfs5).

Theoretically all W2K 'should' have done when it found your ntfs4 drive was to convert it to ntfs5. But possibly - for whatever reason it 'may' have reconfigured the NT data drive? I'm not totally convinced that this has happend...

What does W2K Disk manager show for this drive; or is that where you have already discovered that the drive appears now to be 2 and 8 Gig partitions etc.?

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q153973

may be of help; it's the only item in the KB I could find that remotely goes into this mess?

Disk Probe (mentioned in the M$ KB above) may help you see what's happening; also to recover?

If this drive content was (is) critical then I 'think' there are utils around that may allow recovery of the data; and there are outfits around who will also do the job? The latter will usually charge a premium; the former may not be too many $$$/£££'s? The NSC and similar security outfits are alleged to have ways of getting just about anything off a drive - regardless of what's been done to it (delibrately or otherwise); but 'they' may not be all that willing to oblige with just how they do it?