Need Maxtor Help - Please help!

adamfunman

Greetings everyone. Here is my problem.
I have a HP Pavlion (p3-933) that came with a 40gig maxtor hd. Everything was working fine until I purchased a 160 gig maxtor on saturday. My intentions were to add it as a slave, however, after I installed it my system was hanging (which was because the old drive was designated f: so when I added a new slave my computer switched it back to c: which made the system hang at xp boot up, or so I think). Anyways, I made the new drive the master, the old 40 gig slave and until yesterday my computer would recognize the drive, but wouldn't show me any contents.

After running scandisk and leaving it for hours and hours it now shows up in windows and I can retrieve "some" files, but most it won't let me copy, open, etc. I tried to use spinrite and after purchasing its now telling me that my bios has my HD at a different size then what the partition is. So I checked, and sure enough..thats the case.

1.) Is my drive pooched? (keeping in mind that I can see the folders now in XP)
2.) Is my BIOS pooched?
3.) How can I fix my bios to show the correct size for the hard drive.. keeping in mind its showing it as a 32gig drive, not 40.
4.) Am I out in left field on this? Is there a whole different issue that I have missed?

I desperately need to recover data from this drive, so any advise anybody has will be very much appreciated.

Thanks in advance!
Adam F.

P.S. If anyone wants a GMAIL account, send me an e-mail to adamfunman@hotmail.com, I have 6 left.

BlackHawk

You could try taken out the new HDD and putting in the old one as master. Clear the CMOS and if it doesn't boot, try a repair installation. Also another thing is that the cable could've also been damaged when adding or chaning the HDD's. If you have an extra one, swap it.

adamfunman

Thanks for the tip. I just swapped it but no change. But it was probably a good idea to put the newer cable in anyways. As mentioned earlier, I think my problem is that the BIOS isn't recognizing the drive for what it really is.. which is causing the rest of the problems.

Black Hawk wrote:

You could try taken out the new HDD and putting in the old one as master. Clear the CMOS and if it doesn't boot, try a repair installation. Also another thing is that the cable could've also been damaged when adding or chaning the HDD's. If you have an extra one, swap it.