Hard Drive disaster!! PLEASE Help !!!

I used Acronis OS Selector: Rescue Media Buider to make a rescue CD.
I rebooted my PC and I was taken into OS Selector's GUI.
It seemed to only have picked up 1 of 3 hard drives on my computer. It only picked up my 320GB hard drive- my biggest hard drive and one with the most data. (I have a different OS on each hard drive.)
It then prompts me, telling me that it needs to resize the partition contained on that hard drive from 298Gb -> 298Gb. So I click next, etc. It immediately brought a progress bar which wasn't moving at all. I let my computer sit for about 5 minutes, and it moved 1 notch. I thought something was fishy, and I hit the reset button on my computer. I logged back onto XP(off my 80GB drive), and went into My Computer. I tried accessing the 320GB and was told that "F:\ is not formatted, would you like to format it now?". In a rush of panic and fear, I used a program called Testdisk to rebuild the hard drive's partition, as this program has worked in the past. I didn't solve the problem.

Every time I now try to access the hard drive from My Computer, I am given the message
"F:\ is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable"
I am extremely distressed about this, and I can't begin to explain how important the files in that hard drive are.
I REALLY REALLY need the information contained on this hard drive. PLEASE PLEASE give me some ideas on how to get the partition back, so I can access the hard drive like I used to. ANY help is much appreciated! Thank you !

 

As you have OS what info do you get if you load up DD10 for this drive?

I assume this all means you don't have an image of the drive?

You could be lucky and just the mbr/bootsector is up the spout - or if formatting has occured then you may have lost everything.

There are utilities other than the one you mentioned that might be able to reconstruct the partition information. In the meantime don't try writing any data to the drive as this will make the chances of recovery less likely thn they already are.

You might want to post this problem in the DD10 archive.

I'm not sure why you needed to reboot to make a rescue CD, this isn't normal behaviour.

Colin

 

Hey Colin, DD10 is pretty much useless. As far as recovery goes, all I saw in its GUI was an option to "Recover Partitions". It did a few searches on my hard drives, and came up with no results. Is there anywhere else within the program that could help me? And when I moronically hit the reset button on my computer, the drive wasn't being formatted. It was only being resized, supposedly. With that logic, I'm assuming nothing was deleted. I'm missing the boot sector and/or mbr. And yes, it made me restart the computer in DOS to make the rescue CD. I'm not completely sure why, but hey, that's Acronis for ya.

 

Resizing a partition does result in the MFT being altered and if an entry gets deleted in there, then without a special undelete utility your file may well be lost.

Do you have an XP or Vista CD? If it just the boot information up the spout, then one of these CD's can fix it pretty smartish.

Colin