What could make a partition 'disappear'?

[redqueen]

A friend has a hard drive partitioned, and now neither Windows nor DOS can 'see' the partition.

He's running XP Home, and the computer just shut down about a week ago. Apparently when he booted it back up, neither Windows nor DOS would recognize anything but the Windows folder. It's a 250gb drive and the only thing that shows up is the 10gb Windows folder.

He also tried to do a restore but it only saw the files in the Windows folder.

Any ideas, please?

[EvolveOrConvolve]

1. Could be a virus or a bad hard drive

You could have him try something like this: http://www.partition-recovery.com/.

There are also 3rd party partitioning tools that may be able to see the drive even though Windows doesn't.

[CK_John]

2. Size limits may be a problem, pin settings on a IDE drive, or a whacked MBR.

If your machine has a floppy, boot with a Win98SE or WinME disk and run "fdisk /mbr" without the quotes. Or pull the HD and put in another machine as a "slave" drive and save your data if readable(you may need to change pin setting if IDE drive or you may need to add a sata drive in the bios).

Boot with a live linus disk, Ubuntu should work fine to see if it shows and reads the HD. If so copy data files to a stick drive and burn CD on another machine. (Unless you are linux savvy, I would stick to looking and copying.)

And the last chance is to boot an XP disk and enter "r" recovery and try and do a repair(MS support has a recovery tutorial).

[redqueen]

3. Thanks for your answers...

I've been looking online too... lots of things to check, but I wanted to make sure to pick the brains of DU's experts as well. :hi: