Need Helllp! 2 HD's data Lost!

[temple-Lobe]

Hi

My PC is 2.62 Ghz, 512 RAM, winXP home sp2.

I run a business from home and recently lost not one, but two HD's with 70GB of
important Data.

I wondered if there was a way to get it back.

First files disapear off my drive, I do virus scans - nothing.

After discovering something was amis in Recovery console I booted my slave drive (which was an identical copy of the master)
only to discover that one was corrupted also.

As things stand:

I bought a new 160Gb HD put it in as master and attempted to get the data off either of the other drives,
setting one to slave.

To my horror both were apparently empty!

I went into disk management and it's reading 10mb Fat12?? and the other disk is reading nothing?? Disc shows as active and
healthy.


Tried Disk Investigator program and theres files on it but it can't read them.
that's only reading 10mb as well, FAT12.

Tried the slave (clone) and it reads a full 80gig drive, but it reads as empty! with no file system at all.??

One more disk check:


Checking file system on F:
The type of the file system is FAT.


One of your disks needs to be checked for consistency. You
may cancel the disk check, but it is strongly recommended
that you continue.
Windows will now check the disk.
Volume Serial Number is 9785-F627
Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.

2130018304 bytes total disk space.
98304 bytes in 1 hidden files.
483491840 bytes in 2 files.
1646428160 bytes available on disk.

32768 bytes in each allocation unit.
65003 total allocation units on disk.
50245 allocation units available on disk.


Can anyone tell me if I can retrieve the 70Gb of data I originally lost? or should I say goodbye to it !! - I've kina given up on it but don't understand how 2 HD's
got deleted.

XP runs on NTFS and the files left on HD are FAT12? so is this why the drive appears empty - because it's the wrong file
system?

if you need more info on events leading up to this problem ckick this link:

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=142501

It's a long post but has everything in it I can recall.

Help is appreciated, thanks

[TheCheekMaster]

spinrite is good at recovering data...
www.grc.com

[paulreed]

Stop using the drive, the recovery chances depend on the usage of disk space used after data loss. Don't panic temple-Lobe, Data Recovery Software can easily recover your data. Connect the drive from which you want to recover the data to another healthy system as a slave and run the recovery program. Whatever the software, though, a potent point to remember is that when you download the program it is best saved on a disk other than the one you hope to recover data from or you could be permanently erasing otherwise recoverable data.