Please tell me what to do. I have a hard disk 40 gega, Samsung, FAT 32. It did not have an operating system and had only one partition. I used it as a backup hard disk. I got a new hard disk and installed WinXP on it, NTFS , and when I tried to access the 40 gega hard disk, it only recognized 10 geges and even these 10 gega have weird directories with names and characters and nothing of what was really there. How can I retrieve the information I had before on the hard disk ? Is this a virus or is it a problem with the partition tables and disk . I have antivirus software and it did not detect any viruses. Please tell me what to do.

You've moved the drive to either primary slave now or secondary master/slave now right? It's my guess you've got it incorrectly configured in your BIOS. XP is of course fully compatible with NTFS and FAT32 so you should have no problems using a spare drive for backup stuff...I myself have one so it's not that.

Since it's a spare disk I would recommend that you reformat the disk. Go to Disk Management and setup the disk as you like. J. j e r u v y a t y a h o o d o t c o m

Thanks for your reply. Well, this is what's happening exactly. I have 2 hard disks ( 40 gega each , one has 4 partitions (C: windows 98, D: windows XP , E,F: backups), and one has 1 partition ( C: all backups with no operating system ) . I bought a new hard disk 160 gega to put everything on it and save the other 2 hard disks for other purposes. I installed windows XP on the 160 gega hard disk NTFS , and I connected both hard disks to it as slaves. The first partition of each hard disk was fully screwed up and did not have the same information that used to exist there. The same gibberish chinese characters for directory names and file names were exactly the same on both first partitions of the 40 hard disks . This means, I practically lost the windows 98 partition and the whole 40 gega single partition. I care about data on both, especially the 40 gega single partition. Is this a virus ? I know that it should be because both first partitions indicated the same size and included same directories and folders ( which were never there ) Please try to help me to recover my lost data.

I would recommend you run diagnostics on the drive to see if there are any errors that may explain the wierd dir names. It could be a virus, then it could be a jumbled boot up on unknown hardware too. It could be a trashed MBR, simply requiring a fixmbr to be run. Check the disks thoroughly, then try to see if fixmbr or fixboot will repair the file structure. I wouldn't get too far if the disk has data you could try to get some recovery tools to retrieve this information regardless of the boot record or partition table corruption, but don't write the drive until you've performed the recovery. J. j e r u v y a t y a h o o d o t c o m