Problem with the HDD

[wiskic10_4]

Heya sumitprateek

How much data are we talking about here? I can't imagine it is a massive amount if it's for "legal matters" or whatever, as most spreadsheets and document files are relatively small. Do you have any removable media? Preferably flash drive(s) or external HDD?

All other data recovery sw's had been ineffective in detecting my drive's format. Using Bart PE Windows Live CD shows the drive's format as RAW.

What all other "recovery sw's" did you try? Did you try to boot with a Knoppix Live CD? I would definitely boot with Knoppix and see what it detects from your HDD... If it can see your files, you may copy the important ones over to a flash drive or whatever.

I tried the old "crook" way of using the windows xp installer to copy setup files to the hdd, and expected that boot loader to compile boot.ini

Huh? Not sure what you mean by that... Do you mean that you used the Recovery Console and used the fixboot/fixmbr commands? If not, then you should have...

But yikes, the whole thing got f***ed up. The whole disk ended up being RAW from NTFS !

What detected it as RAW? You put the HDD in another computer? Or the BartsPE

Again, I would boot w/ Knoppix, and if it can see your files, I would copy them over to a flash drive. Try that and post back here and we'll go from there.