Technology Forum

I've got a strange hard drive problem that has me stumped. Basically, I opened my case to temporarily hook up an IDE hard drive to transfer some files, and when I booted up, my main hard drive (a 250 GB Hitachi) was not being recognized. It didn't show up in the BIOS or in Vista under My Computer. I didn't touch the Hitachi drive when hooking up the temp drive, so this was odd. I should mention that the drive is IDE and I am using a SATA>IDE adapter (my motherboard is SATA only). I tried troubleshooting by disconnecting all of the SATA drives except for the Hitachi, and attempting to boot. I tried connecting it to each of the SATA ports systematically, but it did not show up in the BIOS on any of them. Then I connected my HD with Vista 32 installed in order to see if Vista recognized it. The Hitachi did not show up under My Computer, but I could see it in the Disk Management screen. It showed the file system as RAW, with all of the space unallocated. It was my main drive with Vista 64 installed and was over 3/4ths full, so this was surprising. I tried TestDisk, and got a strange result. As you can see from the screen cap below, the size of the drive listed is ridiculously too large (it's only 250 GBs, but TeskDisk shows over a terrabyte). Image: http://img91.imageshack.us/img91/783...iskcap1mc5.jpg When I select Analyse using TestDisk, I get "No partition is bootable", then when I do a Quick Search, it scans the drive for about 90 minutes and eventually tells me "Structure ok", but then "No partition found or selected for recovery". A Deeper Search produces the same result. I used a few other recovery programs to attempt to find the partitions (Active@ Partition Recovery, ******, RecoveryFix, Nucleus), but none of them could find either one (there were two partitions - one for the OS, and one for the rest of the disk). Another weird thing is that the programs report the HD model as "D 7 2 2 V A 8", but when it was working the model reported by Windows was completely different (it began with "HDS"). Here is a screen cap showing this oddity. As you can see, this program (RecoveryFix) also detects the drive as being over 1 TB. Image: http://img216.imageshack.us/img216/1...yfixcaptn4.jpg A final point is that if I hook the drive up to my secondary IDE channel (the one used for the CD/DVD drives) instead of using the SATA adapter, it is reported by the programs as being the correct size. However, they all still fail to find the partitions. I am on the verge of cutting my losses and formatting/re-installing Vista 64. However, I have the nagging feeling that I might be missing something obvious. I thought I'd try asking you fine folks before doing the deed. My system specs, in case they help: CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.66 GHz (Conroe E6700) Motherboard: Asus P5B Deluxe RAM: 4 GB PC2-6400 Patriot Power Supply: Strider 600W Problem HD: Hitachi IDE 250 GB, 7200 RPM Any advice would be appreciated!