Hard Drive issues

[codshot]

First of all, I'm fairly new here and I'm impressed with how helpful everyone seems. I'm hoping I can get answers from you guys as well. I'm at work right now and worried about my situation of the computer I have at home. Previous to a few days ago I had an EMachine with an 80 Gb HD and a 200 Gb Maxtor HD I had installed after purchase. A few days ago I aquired a 250 Western Digital HD to replace the 80 Gb primary. I installed the drive, transfered all the data to the 250 and everything was running fine. Last night, about 2 days later, I tranferred some data from the 200 to the 250 to free up some HD space and immediatly after the transfer finished all of my downloads to my 200 were popping up errors. I went to My Computer and the F:/ drive is still there but it shows no details. If I bring up properties it tells me 0 space out of 0 has been used. I wont be home again for a few hours and I was hoping to get some ideas on how to fix it. Thanks!
Brian

[Nate89]

a simple reformat may do the trick since theres nothing on the drive anyway u wouldnt lose anything...just right click on the drive and click format...if it doesnt let u do it that way u will need a windows cd just tell it to start installing windows and once its to the screen where u pick the drive u want just format drive F and then restart dont install windows

[codshot]

on the contrary....the HD in error is the 200 Gb that was my slave drive before I got the new 250. it's got about 180 Gb of hard to replace data. Thus why I'm trying to find a way to fix it!

[Nate89]

o sry i read your post wrong i thought it was the other way around....well have u tried doing a system restore by any chance?

[codshot]

no....I discovered that the drive wasnt being read after I was already late for work. I haven't had the chance to really look into it yet. I didnt know if this was a sign of a crash...a faulty cable....or anything really.

[Nate89]

well hope u figure something out cause to me it doesnt sound like a faulty cable...sounds just like a crash happened to my friend too

[codshot]

well is there any possible way to recover the files before it finally goes dead. I ran the Maxtor program and it said the drive is failing and to hurry up and backup all files.

[Nate89]

now that u will have to get the opinion of one of the more experienced posters on here but untill then all i can say is u may need to look into professional help for that because i dont know how u would do that

[Big Booger]

Format the new drive, the copy the files over as fast as you can get them. I lost 80 gigs or so of info because I thought I could just not use the drive (disconnect it) and then try to get the info later.. big mistake.

You want to try to copy as much of the drive as you can. If it is vital data, that you could never replace, I'd try going the pro route and letting a company handle it. But it can be quite expensive.

You can get a quote from the site below:
http://www.emaglink.com/dataRcvMain.htm

You could try it yourself using a software utility:

http://www.runtime.org/

But that is risky. Whatever you do, you need to hurry it up. THe longer you wait the more likely it is that your data will be unrecoverable.