[thingie2]

any other ideas?

[thingie2]

still looking for ideas if anyone has any.

[spot]

What I'd do next, it if was vital to get these files and the machine was sat in front of me, is I'd test to see whether there's evidence that some of these doc files have survived on the surface of the drive. The product you need to do a surface scan is the pair I mentioned earlier, sleuthkit and autopsy. Don't try to install them, just get a live DVD which already has them installed. Have a quick look at <Link hidden. Register for free to see this link!> for the principles. <Link hidden. Register for free to see this link!> has the programs on a bootable CD/DVD. You run autopsy from a browser pointed to localhost:9999/autopsy and it will let you surface scan for words you know were in a particular doc that's disappeared. It'll show you all the areas of the disk where the key phrase you gave it survives. You can then ask to see all the surrounding text. That will let you discover whether the missing documents are underneath the current drive D: or under the uninstalled section - I suspect they're under drive D: but that's purely guessing until you find out. You'll be able to extract all the lost text with a bit of effort so long as you have keywords to get to each, but you'll lose the old formatting. If nothing else you'll learn a lot about hard drives in the process.

If they're actually under the unallocated space then maybe we can find a tool that knows what a doc looks like, but I've never seen one. I've never looked for one either, so maybe it exists.

[philthomas]

I've just read over this thread briefly and noticed in post #13, you said you plugged in your old 40gb HDD. This made me think ....... can you verify that the 250gb HDD was installed and running by itself, as the main OS boot drive ?
Also was it partitioned as NTFS or FAT32 ? .... and were there any other partitions ?

Have you changed the jumpers at any stage ?

[thingie2]

Well i'll try that later spot, don't have time now.

@philthomas: ok, so the 250GB drive was the drive that iwas using with my OS on before then, all was working fine. It was as NTFS and there wern't any other partitions. I havn't changed the jumbers at all i don't think (I may have done just can't remember) but I tried doing this ages ago and the 40GB hdd didn't work but this didn't happen to my other drive. So I assumed it atleast wouldn't damage my drive if I tried again, but obviously it did this time.

[spot]

What I wrote really is overkill. What I just realized, though, is that Zero Assumption Recovery might do a better job at scanning the whole drive rather than just D: - you might run it in free trial mode and see if it gets the entire surface rather than just D: like the last one seems to have done. Again it's a leave-it-on-overnight sort of trial.

<Link hidden. Register for free to see this link!>

I've used it, though not for what you're looking for. What I used it for it was very good at.

[thingie2]

ok, downloaded that, i'll try it next time I shutdown my computer because I don't have that hdd connected at the moment