Couple nights ago I had to reinstall XP pro. I have a 300 gb hdd that was divided into 4 partitions. C was operating system, D was Programs, E and F were for storage. All worked fine before the reinstall.

When I reinstalled xp via an xp disk it only showed up the C partition when it asked me to choose location for install. And it showed a total of 120 or so gb. I formatted that partition and reinstalled xp. It locked up a couple times and I had to restart it a couple times, formating each time. And each time it only showed the 120gb.

XP finally installed but now under my computer it only shows C drive and my two optical drives. Opticals show up as D and E. They used to show up as G and H.

Under Admin Tools it shows the C partition and the other 230 gb as unallocated.

I downloaded a free trial of a data recovery program. It sees the old partitions and files. So I know the partitions are still there. But they want 300 bucks to recover the data.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Mike
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That's too bad, that must have been windows xp pre service pack 1 I assume, which didn't recognize drive sizes greater than 137 gigabytes.

If not, that's a strange one.

But since the damage is done, your only option is to get a data recovery tool, you might find one cheaper than the one you found though.

I actually don't understand how it happened, windows shouldn't have redone the partition table in the first place unless you were changing partitioh sizes or something.

Personally, I'm now doing all my formatting and partitioning with gparted livecd, which handles ntfs nicely, then I'd just install windows onto the partition, but it's too late for that.

I'd guess the crash had something to do with the process, that shouldn't have happened either.
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