Help! Cant read hard drive!

[killerdoberman]

As you explained the situation, this is how I understand it.

Drive #1 = existing drive on computer
Drive #2 = Adding to computer with critical information.

Is this right so far?

How did you hook them up?

Option 1. Drive #1 and Drive #2 onto one IDE channel, i.e master & slave? Either by jumpering Master & Slave or by jumpering Cable Select on each.

Option 2. Drive #1 = channel 1, Drive #2 = channel 2, i.e. master & master?

After you had all of the drives connected, you formatted and reinstalled Windows on the Drive #1. Is this correct?

If it is, I am thinking that you used option #1, and you accidentally formatted Drive #2.

 

[saiello]

The drives are according to BIOS: #1=Primary Master #2=Secondary Slave. I downloaded a trial version of a data recovery program and it verifies that the data is intact on #2 and that it resides on an NTFS logical partition. Unfortunately it cannot read the partition information. The same results were obtained using a DOS version of a data recovery program so there's no doubt that the data is there. If the partition information has been corrupted, how could this have happened, and more to the point what can I do about it? Is there software out there that will rebuild the partition information?

Thanks.