OT: Recovering an NTFS drive

I'm asking here 'cos I've seen other techies post here.

I booted from my XP SP2 CD to try and perform scandisk on a drive. (I
couldn't defrag it because there was some problem or other which
Windows suggested I run scandisk to fix). The PC loaded up the
drivers etc, but then the PC rebooted. Great. Even better, now, my
other 300gb drive is showing as "not initialized" and "unallocated" in
the Computer Management tool. This has happened before, and I fixed
it by initializing it, then running some freeware app to recover
files, which it sort of did, although it couldn't get everything back,
but it was mostly ok. I have no idea why this happens. It doesn't
seem to be something which I can find references to on the net. My
PC is ok apart from this, and I have no idea why it happens. I have
two physical drives. One is partitioned as C: and D:, which are fine,
and the other is F:.

So my questions are:

1) Why does this happen?
2) Which app do you recommend I use to recover the data?
3) Is there a way of simply `initializing` the drive and have it
rebuild the various structures it needs to see the data which is
manifestly still perfectly intact on the drive?

Cheers!

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: DVD problems solved?
    ... drive properties under the tools tab, ... Although I haven't confirmed it yet, I do seem to get better results with blank DVDs rated at 4X rather than multi-speed ones rated up to 8X or 10X. ... SCANDISK- One suggested testing the DVDs using scandisk. ... COMMON SENSE- You need to have a good DVD, and your drives should be clean. ...
    (alt.sys.pc-clone.dell)
  • Re: Recovering an uninitialized NTFS hard disk
    ... then running some freeware app to recover ... two physical drives. ... Which app do you recommend I use to recover the data? ... Is there a way of simply `initializing` the drive and have it ...
    (alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt)
  • scandisk executing on boot, DSL problems
    ... an Actiontec external modem (connects through the ... The computer is setup for dual boot ... time it decides it needs to run scandisk (maybe it's ... The computer has 2 hard drives and is ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.network_web)
  • Re: disk repair w/ XP?
    ... I have a HP desktop PC w/ W98 that will not boot up. ... I noticed that there is no ScanDisk w/ XP. ... Then the other question is that the laptop uses NTFS. ... combinations of NTFS, FAT32, FAT16, and FAT12, on different drives, or ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.basics)
  • Recovering an uninitialized NTFS hard disk
    ... I booted from my XP SP2 CD to try and perform scandisk on a drive. ... then running some freeware app to recover ... two physical drives. ... Which app do you recommend I use to recover the data? ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)