I installed a new Maxtor 40GB Hard Drive in my PC a little over a year ago. I also have another HD with Linux installed and I use LILO on the primary to pick WIndows or Linux. I haven't had any problem with the hard drive until this afternoon. When I boot-up, after the BIOS runs it says "Operating system not found". I went back into the BIOS and had it to automatically detect the hard drive again. It detected it fine. I booted up with a boot disk and it could not read drive C: . FDisk showed me that it has 1 non-DOS partition (the LILO I am assuming) and 1 Ext DOS partition. I'm unsure if a virus has corrupted the partition table or what ... Does anyone have any ideas how I could at least get all of my data off of it before I wipe it clean or buy a new one?

you could either put the drive in another computer as a slave drive, boot into the other comnputers operating system and pick off your data. or you could use knoppix or windows PE, (operating system on a cd) to boot into and either copy the info over the network, on another hdd, on a flash drive, or burn it.
you may want to consider going to maxtors website and downloading the diagnostic bootable iso image so you can test out your drive to see if it is bad.

Ok, after fooling around with this until 4:30 this morning, here is what I've come up with. I installed another HD into my computer and installed Windows on it. I then added the other hard drive as a slave. BIOS saw this hard drive, but Windows didn't not. I have come to realize that I was mistaken. There is no partition table on this hard drive. I even tried Knoppix and no such luck. I am currently looking into some program which will restore the partition, but there are so many out there on downloads.com. I downloaded GetDataBack which seems to be finding the data ok, but it doesn't restore without a $79 key purchase. Any thoughts on how I can recover my data?

i use a version of "easy recovery professional"
btw, i am no linux guru, but as far as i can remember you have to use fat32 partition on a windows partition to see/use/share space with a linux distribution. therefore if u are using ntfs you may not be able to see the linux part. please someone correct me if im rong. and could this be the case?


o btw, did you use a maxtor diagnostic tool to see if it is a bad drive?