Secondary hard drive pluged in during win 7 instalation, now "system reserved" on it. Lost data?

[czajnikow]

Hi,
I installed win 7 on a new SSD drive and later discovered that the secondary hard drive (2T) was connected. During the installation i deleted all partitions and formatted the last visible partition. I don't remember, if i formatted anything else.

About a week after the installation of win 7 i tried to access the secondary drive (i still have some files on it), but i couldn't.

In the "disk management" it was showing that the secondary drive is divided into "system reserved" and "unallocated space" . i disconnected the secondary drive and did a fresh installation of win 7 on the SSD drive. Then, i connected back the secondary hard drive. Now, i still can not access the data that was on the secondary hard drive.


the question is:
how do i access data that was on the secondary drive before the installation of win 7?

and easy one: how to attach a snipping tool screenshot of the disk management to this forum

Any help will be highly appreciated.

thanks

[/img]

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Hey there, czajnikow!

The System Reserved partition is always placed on the 'first physical hard drive or partition'.
From what you are sharing, your secondary hard drive must have been plugged in the first SATA port in order for the system to recognize it and save the 'System Reserved' partition on it.
You could try some third party software to recover the data, but if the files on your secondary drive are very important, I'd simply seek the help of a professional data recovery company.
Here are a couple of threads that might help you with the solution though:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/264968-32-dissapeared-unallocated-extremely-worried
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/269189-32-unallocated-error

Hope this was helpful!
SuperSoph_WD

 

[czajnikow]

Thank you SuperSoph_WD for your reply. I highly appreciate that you have taken time to reply to my post.

My secondary hard drive must have been plugged in the first SATA port, as I was too lazy to swap the hard drive around.

I had some not backed up files on the external hard drive that I wanted to recover. I have tried to recover the lost files with EASUS recovery wizard 8.5 free, but with no luck. EASUS offered 2GB of files recovery for free, so I thought if it could recover 2 GB I might have purchased the software and recover the rest of the files. It recovered many files, but I could not open them. Some of the files had size 0kb, other were corrupted.

I also used Stellar Phoenix Windows Recovery and Wondershare Data Recovery, but also could not open the recovered files.

I cannot paste the screen shot of disk management status so I will just type it in:

Now, the disk management states the following:

Disk 0 basic 223.57 GB

Blue box (on the left)

System reserved 100MB NTFS Healthy (System, active, primary partition)

Blue box (on the right)

(C 223.57 GB NTFS healthy (boot, page file, crash dump, primary partition,)

Disc 1 basic 1863.01 GB

Blue box (on the left)

System reserved 100MB NTFS Healthy (active, primary partition)

Black box (on the right)

1862.92 GB unallocated

I think I will cut the loses and format the secondary hard drive.

Once again thank you for taking time to reply to my post

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Hi again, czajnikow!

Yes, it appears as unallocated but the "System reserved" partition is on it, because the OS must have gotten confused while you were installing it on the SSD. That's why it's recommended to perform the procedure without any other SATA drive plugged besides the OS SSD/HDD.
It's very unfortunate about the data on that HDD, I hope it wasn't very important. My advice is next time to backup everything before re-organizing or installing new storage device, that's the best way to prevent the headache of data loss.
You can use this link for steps to partitioning and formatting your secondary HDD:
http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3865

Keep me posted! Hope this helps you!
SuperSoph_WD