Ok, I'm not a tech junkie so I'll try to explain this as best as possible. My computer came with 2 hard drives (C: and E. I recently reformatted my computer and deleted the partitions on both drives (because that's what I thought I was supposed to do). Now, only 1 hard drive shows up after reinstalling XP. Is there a way I can recover my E: drive? Thanks in advance.
Sounds like you have one drive with two partitions, otherwise the second drive would most likely be D:. I use a program called Ontrack for this very issue when customers do this or just delete files. It works very well and can recover data from failing drives as well. It may depend on what you deleted to justify the cost of the software. It's not too much. Check Ontrack.com. There are some free ones that do the same thing but require more technical skill. Google "Hiren" if you want to go the free route. Be advised some of the apps on the Hiren CD are, well, how should I put this, uhhh, supposed to be purchased. Edit: If you do in fact have two separate drives you are in better shape. Don't load anything on the second drive until you have tried to recover the data. Once you start writing data to the second drive the amount of recoverable data will be less. The apps above can restore partitions and your drive will act like nothing happened.
Actually, you're right. When I purchased it, I had the option of partioning it to 2 drives and did. So does that mean when I ended up with just one drive, I still retained all the gigs I originally had? Of course, the problem is that I don't remember how many gigs I originally had before the reformat. Oh, and I'll, uh, "purchase" the software if need be.
If you deleted both drives and formatted the drive after, it will depend on if you used full capacity of the existing drive when you reformatted. Sounds like all the data on that E: drive is gone...but if you just want another drive, i would shrink your new XP C: drive and make a partition again. This way you can store files there etc.
Thanks again for all the help and advice, guys. Yeah, I reformatted both drives and deleted the partition. So I know I lost all my previous data and have only one drive. I just want to know if I actually physically lost any gigs on my drive or if that's even possible. Like for example, both the C: and E: drives had 40 gigs each, does my one C: now contain 80 gigs since it's not partitioned anymore?
That should be what happened. If you run Explorer (not Internet Explorer) and right click on the icon for the C: drive and select "Properties" from the menu, it will give you a graph of your drive and say how big your drive is. It might be possible, but I think it would be difficult. A format actually does a bad job of deleting the actual data, and there are ways to "unformat" a drive pretty easily with commonly available, even free, software. But now that that part of the drive is in a partition that is in use (that is, has files written to it), it would be very difficult to get the files back whole and intact. If you have some important business stuff, you can look up professional data recovery people, but that can get expensive. You can try this: http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/ Their iUndelete might get you something back, depending on how many new files you put on the computer after formatting.
So it probably retained the same number of gigs? I know how to check the status of my drives but the problem is I don't remember how many gigs I had before.
Yeah, gigs are a function of the hardware. If you were using all the disk before, and if you are using all the disk now, then you should have the same amount of memory. If you want to see the real status of your hard drive, go to the Control Panel and select the Administrator Tools. In there, select computer management, an in that application select disk management on the left. You will get a graph of exactly how large the hard drive is, how it is partitioned, and what if any space you are not using.
Oh my god, you are a life saver. I just looked in the Computer Management and saw my extra gigs lying there unused. I just partitioned it and it's currently formatting. I assume it'll take a few mins so it should be all set. Hopefully that solved everything but if I do have another question, hope you don't mind me asking. Thanks so much though. I really appreciate it.