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Fat32 partition overwritten by NTFS
Name: FatDave Date: September 9, 2003 at 17:47:28 Pacific OS: Windows XP Pro CPU/Ram: AMD 1024Mb
Comment:
I purchased a Hitachi 120Gb drive and swapped it with a Maxtor 80Gb drive. I then formatted the Hitachi 120Gb drive as NTFS and copied over about 20Gb to test it. All seemed well so I Removed the Hitachi 120Gb drive and put my Maxtor 80Gb drive back (same IDE slot) in the computer and Windows XP Pro picked up the drive change and requested a reboot, upon restart up my Maxtor 80Gb drive had picked up the settings of the Hitachi 120Gb drive. I know this is impossible but upon further investigation Windows XP Pro had replaced the MBR of the Maxtor 80Gb drive with the Hitachi 120Gb drive MBR. The Maxtor 80Gb drive had 3 FAT32 partitions on it 20Gb 30Gb 30Gb and was full of data, is it possible for me to recover the Fat32 partitions? and if it is, how do I go about it
Name: kkk Date: September 9, 2003 at 18:04:40 Pacific
Reply:
you have a clear misunderstanding of computer software. xp does not manage the mbr to the point of 'swithching 'from one drive to another. the bios will always autodetect the drive change out, and as long as both drives were formatted and xp loaded with the same motherboard drivers, both should boot to that motherboard set of drivers, without that 'impossible' switching you mention. both drives would have to be fat32 formatted in order to 'see'and read each others files. i don't think you gave us the whole story about what you did
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Response Number 2
Name: ok Date: September 9, 2003 at 19:08:41 Pacific
Reply:
did you turn off the computer,and unplug the power from the outlet or power supply, before switching hard drives? thats the only way i can think of, is if you hot swapped the drives, while the pc was powered up, which is not a good thing. it could burn up the hard drive circuitry, and motherboard. or when you formatted the hitachi to ntfs you somehow converted the maxtor to ntfs, and/or formatted the fat32 partitions. just a conversion to ntfs with xp wouldn't mess with the data.
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Response Number 3
Name: and Date: September 9, 2003 at 19:14:04 Pacific
Reply:
search for using the windows xp cd, recovery console and running the fixmbr command.
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Response Number 4
Name: brian Date: September 10, 2003 at 11:55:44 Pacific
Reply:
It seems like you left a lot of valuable data out. If you didn't power off the PC then you need to learn how to change out hard drives correctly. But, I will go with that you powered off the PC and knew how to swap hard drives correctly. I will try to get the facts straight. You partitioned the 120 gb hdd to a 20GB NTFS partition with a Windows XP installation. Then, powered down the pc and swapped hard drives. Rebooted pc and saved changes, which asked for a reboot and when you booted back up it showed the 120 gb MBR on the Maxtor hard drive. Then, you probably converted the partition to NTFS, which didn't recognize your FAT 32 partitions because the MBR only recognizes NTFS.
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