HDD Problems

Alright, here's the story, a few years back I got a Maxtor 120gb HDD for my computer, installed it, worked fine for two years.

Now, recently I had to reinstall Windows XP.(My main HDD, the one that came with the computer, basicly broke, I had to send it back into HP where they replaced it.) I got the computer home, booted it up and installed XP from my boot disks, but now I can't access my my Maxtor drive, which sucks because the HP drive is only 70gb and is already getting really full just from me reinstalling my stuff.

The odd thing is that the computer knows that the Maxtor drive is there, it appears in the Device Manager, Disk Manager, even chkdsk etc, it just won't show up in My Computer or let me access it in any way.

Reformatting the drive is pretty close to out of the question, as it had about 70gb worth of valuable information. (Games, documents, pictures, music, pr0n.)

So do any of you have l33t FBI CP-finding skills that I learn and use to access my HDD?

Linux will fix your problems, if that fails, try Opera.

>>2

Hmm, is this the only way? Or is there a way that doesn't require me to install a completely new OS that I have no experiance with? I also don't like the idea that some of my programs might not be Linux/Opera compatable. Or perhaps my complete ignorance of OSes other than Windows is showing...

>>3
ya

use a preinstallation environment or a live-cd to copy the important files to something else and proceed to kick the drives ass

>>1
How big and what filesystems are the partition(s) on that Maxtor?
Did your HP come with SP1? SP2?
Be happy that your Maxtor lasted as long as it did.
I swear those things have an internal deathclock set to 1-yr from purchase.
Sectors containing MFT are probably shot; along with any hope of data recovery.

As far as I know theres nothing wrong with the Maxtor drive, aside from my inability to access it, the whole problem that caused me to reboot the system came from the original HP drive. I actually got my HP about 4 years ago, and added the Maxtor drive about a year after that. I believe I had SP2, however I could be wrong in that regard.

Oh, it's a 120GB drive, no partitions and it came with whatever filesystems would be standard for putting such a drive onto an WinXP computer.

>>8
Standard, huh? More like you don't know...
no partitions = no data

>>9

That's about the size of it... So should I just reformat it and write it off? Or are there any good free data recovery programs you can point me towards?