Hello All, I helped a friend set up her Desktop Conuter. I slaved another HDD to the system on which she put all her Data. oen day, the Master Drive failed and was re-formatted, the O.S. was reinstalled.successfully. Now if she want to access the data disk, it says '' the disk in drive D is not formatted, do you want to format it now?'' I asked 'the Geek' and he recommended 'spinrite' (a data recovery software. but i am really low on cash right now. Please do anyone have info about a free software or tool that can help me fully recover my friend's data from from the disk? Thanks in anticipat....

Oh, yuck. From the story you just told it sounds like you had setup the drives as spanned drives. What this means is that part of the data gets written to one drive and part to the other. This is why, when you formatted the primary drive, the second drive quit working because half of the data was wiped out. I could be wrong but if it is the case then you will have to do some reading on how to use a bit reader and even then you will lose half of your files. As for free unerasers, there are many that are not free but they usually have a trial period or like a limit of 5000 files to be restored before they quit. http://www.uneraser.com/ forum on this problem... http://www.chip.in/forums/viewtopic... If you find that you need a bit reader, Knoppix will do the trick but you will need to learn Linux and how NTFS works. This is why the data recovery companies charge so much. http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewto...

Ace, I don't think that setup was used, as the threadstarter said the drive was just a slave, on which data was put. That additional drive should be working OK, as the second drive is not related to the initial problem. You mention spanning, I think about RAID systems ... You should not be formatting or restoring files from the slave drive, it should be accessible. Did the threadstarter install the same OS ?

You can try using 'testdisk', be sure to read the How To and the part you want is recover XP boot record. http://www.cgsecurity.org/index.htm...

Don't think so, disk D does not seem to be a bootdisk, so you do not need to change/fix/create a bootsector on that drive

All partitions contain a Volume Boot Record (VBR). The VBR is made up of 2 parts, 1 is the boot code (not needed if no OS), the 2nd is always needed and is called the Bios Parameter Block (BPB) and it describes the physical layout of partition. In XP sometimes it becomes corrupted and one will normally receive not formatted error, 'testdisk' can fix it normally. Info on BBP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS_p... or just google for Bios Parameter Block.