URGENT: my HDs are completely gone

[Higg]

Hi,

I don't know *what really* happened... I just tried to install a LiteOn CDRW - and because it wasn't detected right from WinOnCD I just started the INSTALL.EXE from the LiteOn DISK...
Now after rebooting my BOTH HDs are completely gone - I can see it just from the BIOS... but when I boot from whatever device there is NO C-drive or D-drive ... my both CD-ROM/RW are accesible though
When I use FDISK from a boot CD it doesn't recognize any partition/HD

PLEASE HELP ME QUICK if you can... I'm completely lost, though I'm no newbie at all

Here are the specs:
- Celeron 400 / 256MB
- win98 1st
- primary/master WD450AA 45GB harddisk (D <IMG SRC="smilies/smile.gif" border="0">
- primary/slave Samsung 8GB Harddisk (C <IMG SRC="smilies/smile.gif" border="0">
- sec/master 40xCDROM
- sec/slave 12x10x32 CDRW LiteOn
... think that's enough

Hope to hear from you soon

[[NeoZeeD]]

is the problem the same even if you remove the liteOn cdrw?
this may or maynot work but wont hurt to try , this worked with me when t/s with other eu on HD.
did you try to go to bios and disable primary and secondary and save and exit, then go back into bios and enable them again and save and exit and see if they came back ?

[Higg]

Just tried what you proposed... but the BIOS doesnt seem to be the prob

There is definetly NO access to the HDs though the BIOS recognizes them as well as before... I have absolutely no clue ... so far...

ADDITIONAL: I just downloaded DataLifeGuard-diagnostics from WD ... it detects both HDs perfectly... what the heck is this...

[Higg]

... so I tried to get a disk work in another PC - no-no-nothing ... it's just recognized in the BIOS but that's all...

Now my real probs start - what to do next? I never thought I could stuck like this...

When I installed my WD450AA on the celeron, I needed this EZdrive tool to see the whole 45Gig (instead of 32)... and at this installation I succeded (in error and without wanting to... but it worked) to put EZDrive somewhere on my Samsung 8Gig HD ... so now I fear, if I do something like "fdisk /mbr" (could this be something useful, when fdisk doesnt see any drive???) that I totally loose data (well you're right.. at this point I have NO data at all!)

Has somebody ever experienced something half way similar???

cheers

[[NeoZeeD]]

hmmm

well if you do fdisk/mbr i was told two things about that, one it restore/refresh master boot records and two erases them.

also if you go to fdisk you said it shows no partition information, what does it say on screen? does it say no fixed disk present? or does it give you the option to create a partiton?

[amcfreek]

try useing the ezdrive floppy again, ezdrive and other drive overlays kida hide the partition information and dos doesent usually see it as a partition , you have to boot ezdrive to get it to installl the fake partition at boot ,its really weird , you might just try reinstalling ezdrive , these drive overlays are a bitch to work around see if you can rescue it with a boot disk from ezdrives menu, if not its probably going to cost you the data on the hard drive , from now on do youre self a favor and buy a controler card that will see the whole thing without useing those drive overlays i hate soo much , some you need the same f in bios that the damm thing was installed on, ide controllers are around 30 bucks now adays cheep fix , but you can use youre mother boards ides for cdroms hey just my 2-k maybee im not right all the time but ill give it my best
see yah

[Sly]

As above use the EZ-drive disk to recover the boot record for the drives. The program for this is located in one of the sub menus, you can either rewite or recover mbr for each disk.... You should be able to boot from the EZ-Drive disk.. Also look for a Bios up-date for your system.

HTH <IMG SRC="smilies/cool.gif" border="0">

[Garak]

try this, it worked with the seagate software, as far as im aware ez-drive isnt much different.

Boot with the ez-drive boot disk, goto a prompt & try to access c:\
if this works, then u probably need to re-intalise the drive with ez-drive, ifthis fails, it looks like a repartition..

[Megawatt]

I had a problem once with my CDRW due to bus mastering.

The CDRW would not support bus mastering and that caused the HDD's to get lost.

Had a heck of a time uninstalling bus mastering, but that allowed my slow CDRW to peacefully co-exist with my HDDs.

Hope it helps.

[Higg]

Thanks for all your suggests...

well amcfreak, I think you were probably near the point... I hzad troubles to install that 45Gig with ezinstall before... and I'm sure that this was the reason for loosing my HDs

Ok... here is, what I have done now
- I installed a recovery tool (on my second PC) that could (happily for me) see *all* data on both disks...
- I resored the most of my things I really need (as restoring 40Gig is tooo much ;-))
- I bought a 'promise fasttrack66 raid' controller (was just cheap) plus another 40Gig HD
- ... installed the 40G and 45G on the controller and my CD and CDRW at the onboard-IDE
- *AFTER* I wrote zeros on the old 45G HD I was able to access the whole 45G (the damn EZbios had restricted it to 32Gig before... even on the promise-controller - did I tell that I never would use EZinstall again?)

Well that's the story so far... PC is online but not yet fully installed... so I don't know if the CDRW is working fine...

So my problem is 'solved' and I hope you all can enjoy and learn from this...