I have what I think is a very serious problem here. My mother board (p4p800 deluxe) quit working so I brought my hard drive to a buddies house to get some important info off of it. We got somethings off however not everything. I ended up purchasing another motherboard (p4p800). I tried to put my hard drive on my rebuild computer to no avail. I was getting an NTLDR error so thought if I could place this hard drive in another computer I could just retrive the rest of our info. This is when the real fun begins. I hooked this up to an old computer and stepped away for a few minutes. When I came back the computer ran some sort of error correcting program (in windows). I now can not access 80 percent of the files I did on my friends computer. I do know the hard drive is very full still so I think the files are still there just inaccessable. I'm not a 100% sure but i think what happened is my Hard drive changed from a fat 32 to a NTFS. I need to access the files on this hard drive. Can someone point me in the right direction to retrieve these files please. These files are very inportant!
Thanks in advance!
Jim

I'd recommend trying a data recovey program like getdataback or contacting a professional data recovery place like On track data recovery either are just a google away...

I think I'm right in saying that changing from a FAT32 to an NTFS file system usually only happens upon formatting your hard drive.

If your HD has been formatted then:

1 - I'm surprised you can access ANY of your old files, let alone 80% of them,
2 - Your only recourse is through a data recovery service as mentioned above. THIS WILL NOT BE CHEAP!!!!!!

No windows comes with a conversion tool... particularly windows upgrade allows you to convert the file systems... I kind of doubt that is the issue anyway as unless it corrupted windows xp can access fat32 no problem...

Easeus data recovery is a good app for retrieving data, its worked for me in the past and if the data is there it should get it out.

What operating system did you have on the broken computer and what OS is running on the "old" computer. Are you missing the files when the HD is connected to the "old" computer? Have you tried to install it as slave on your friend's computer? If yes, what happened?

I am almost sure that that the "old" computer discovered errors in your HD and asked permission to run check-disk. Since you were not there the count-down to cancellation of check-disk was finished and check-disk started.

Thanks for all the great advice...
To The Sceptic... Every computer except my buddy's was running XP. My buddy's puter was running NT. We originally hooked my drive up to his puter as a slave and it did ask a few questions but I didn't catch what questions it did ask. I think you are 100% right about the 'checking drive for errors' comment. I now believe it was running that check and corrected all the things it thought it needed to when I got back to it. Rather than stop it while it was doing its thing and possibly ruining the drive completely, I let it finish. All this being said... when I now check the properties of that drive the 160 gig only has 40 gig of free space left. On that drive I have pictures and video of my kids. It was very full when my system went down. If you look at what seems to be on it, it now looks like it could take up maybe 10 gig but it still shows that is almost full. Does anyone know how to recover from this 'checking disk for errors' mess up.

Once again… thanks to all for the help!

Download Puppy Linux from my list of links below. Download "puppy 2.16.1 seamonkey fulldrivers.ISO". Burn the ISO file to create a bootable CD. For this purpose you can download BurnCDCC from the links below. It's a very simple tool, used exclusively to burn ISO files.

Insert the disk into the CD/DVD drive and boot the computer. If it doesn't boot, please set boot order in the BIOS so that the CD drive is first priority boot device.

When loaded, click the icon that looks like a pen drive. This should enable approach and back-up of your files. Please let us know what happened.

Do as the Skeptic suggested. The puppy linux is a real neat program for recovery.

As an FYI, windows NT is a real funky OS and will do some weird things because it is an old OS. For future referance, it will only format a 4gb partion. It will only give (I think 4kb sectors). You need to convert to get 512kb. I suspect that that is what messed thing up in the beginning.

Once again thanks for all the advice. Unfortunetly, I will have to do this in the next few days. I will post back and let you in on our success with this drive!