Second HD Shows No Files After System Recovery

[bwilhelm]

I had a physical hard drive crash on my main drive a few weeks back (still in the process of trying to figure out a way to recover those files.) In the meantime i ordered recover disks from HP, removed the 2nd hard drive from the system to make sure it wasn't affected, and restored the system with a new main hard drive, got all the latest windows updates, etc.

My second hard drive previously held all my home movie data, mainly of my two boys as babies (they are now 1 and 3 yrs old.). Anyway, those files were on the second HD.

The problem is now when I plug the second drive into the system and boot the system, Windows XP shows the drive as blank. DiskDirector shows the drive is formatted as Fat32, with only like a 5GB partition and the rest of the drive is free space. Prior to this the drive was fully partitioned (not sure in what filesystem) using all the space of the drive. I also ran DiskDirector on it to see if there were recoverable partitions in the free space, which it said it could not find any on its 'fast' setting.

I know I didn't reformat nor repartition this drive, because i removed it from the system when i started working on the rebuild after the main drive crash to 'protect' it from accidentally being corrupted somehow.

Anybody have any ideas on what has happened and how to recover the files?

I am running Windows XP Home Edition Version 2002 Service Pack 3, on AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 2 GHz, 1 GB RAM machine.

 

[bwilhelm]

OK on the advice of some folks in another forum, I created a ubuntu boot disk, and was able to look at the second drive.

There is a folder called found.000 on the second drive, and inside it about 994 files. Those files are all labeled FILE0000.CHK, FILE0001.CHK, etc.

Are those my files? They aren't large at all so i suspect not. What should I do now?

I should add that in addition to the FOUND.000 folder, there are the files boot.ini, NTDETECT.COM, and another called ntldr.