Wiped Drive?

AlphaTrinity

It seems that somehow my storage drive got wiped yesterday. I have two hard drives, one is for Windows XP SP2, games, etc, the other is for documents, graphic files, videos, etc. I did a defrag yesterday to both drives since they haven't been done in a long time. I turned on my computer today, and when I went to access the storage drive a message popped up saying that the drive has not been formatted. The drive's properties say that the drive is 100% free space, and the disk management utility is telling me the same thing (I believe about 75% or so of the drive should have data on it). Does this mean that I've lost everything on that drive..or by some miracle is my data recoverable? The drive is a Maxtor 80gb IDE, and it's pretty old..probably about six years old or so. Any suggestions would be appreciated, thanks

Thrax

http://icrontic.com/articles/advanced_data_recovery

AlphaTrinity

Hmm..it seemed that I did the correct steps for TestDisk, but after I rebooted nothing changed. All of my files were there when I hit P, so I was thankful for that at least. I also did the chkdsk /r, and it went through a long list of bad files and corrupted files, but didn't seem to fix anything. Should I just keep doing the TestDisk steps until the drive works again, or would that be a bad idea?

By the way awesome article

Thrax

Testdisk is not infallible. If that doesn't work, it's time to move on to GetDataBack.

AlphaTrinity

Well I got GetDataBack and I gave it a shot.
After about an hour all I kept getting were errors

and after another hour not much changed (except for the time remaining)

So I canceled the scan
I was able to get about 75% of the stuff I wanted off of the harddrive anyway, so I'm happy about that.
Thanks for making that fantastic guide