Second HDD - Can't find contents?

weyland-yutani

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so, i reinstalled win7 on a new hdd and now the second hdd is looking very odd. in disc manager it looks like it is split into 3 sections. first section is 100mb(system reserved), the second section says 2,000gb unallocated and the third says 750gb unallocated. only the first section shows up in windows explorer. it didn't show up at all after installation so i opened disc manager and assigned a letter to the first partition, it wouldn't let me assign letters to the other partitions. have i lost all the data, it was a full hdd of data?

would really like to get it back as i backed up all my files from the old installation on to this hdd, so i could just copy it all back onto the new hdd, at least i thought.:(
 
Will that let me get the files into windows on my primary hdd?
 
Yes...you should be able to see both hard drives from the live CD and then just copy and paste whatever files you need.
 
is this a desktop or laptop?

what size is the second hdd?

what did you do the w7 reinstall from manufacturer cd or microsoft cd?

during the install which disc options did you change/did you do any partitioning/formating?
 
How did you install the new disk?
Did you disconnect your old drive, connect the new drive, install windows and all the mobo utilities?
When all working, then connect up the old drive?
 
The 100 meg partition is a normal part of the install for some versions of Window.

What size drive was it previously, looks like a 3TB drive (ish).

Don't try and do anything to write data\ create partition as this may increase chances of losing data.

Software tools like TestDisk and Recuva should be able to access the data and copy it to your new drive and these are free. There are also tools like R-Studio that are paid for tools but have demo mode (limited to restoring 50kb files) if no joy with free ones.

You should be able to get the data back though fairly easily assuming you haven't copied lots of files around.
 

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