New SATA drive

Figment

The recovery disk will set the HDD up exactly the same as it was the day you took it out of the box, so if the HDD had two partitions from new, the new HDD should also have two partitions (if the new HDD is a different capacity, you may have to resize the partitions later)

Robm1955

Thanks Figment. The New HDD is slightly bigger. If I do need to resize, can this be done in Disk Management?

Figment

Correct. Right click on "Computer" > Manage > Disk Management.

Robm1955

Thanks Figment. The recovery disc didn't partition the drive, so I used disk management. Everythings working now, but I have another problem. I still had data on the old drive, so put it in an external case and could still read the data. There were 2 partitions G: and H:. For some reason something went wrong, and I can only read H: now, and G: said I needed to format the drive. I now there is still data there, but I can't get to it. To make things worse, I looked it up on the web, and read that changing the drive letter could help. All this has done is change the partition from NTFS to RAW. Is there any free software I can use to recover the data? It's mainly stuff in my documents and the Desktop. I'm not sure what was still on.

Figment

Was it a recovery disk or a Windows installation disk?

What size is (was) the G: partition?

Robm1955

No it's not a recovery disk, it's the old hard drive. I put it into a SATA case, so I could use it as an external drive. So it was partitioned when I had it in the pc. The problem partition is about 139gb.

Figment

Sorry, I was covering two issues with one post.....

You said

The recovery disc didn't partition the drive, so I used disk management.

Are you sure it was a Recovery Disk, and not a Windows installation Disk?

Then putting the old HDD into the caddy. This would show the two partitions on the old drive, which were formally C: and As the disk is now not the primary drive, the drive letters have been reassigned as G: and H: (not necessarily in the same order! - you should be able to tell which was originally C: by the folder names) Manually changing drive letters alone should not affect the partition formatting.

Robm1955

Yes, it was the recovery disc created when I first got the pc. The G: partition was originally the C: With regards to the changing the folder names, it definately says RAW in disk management.

Figment

OK that explains why it didn't re-create the partition(s) - I thought you were referring to a supplied recovery disk, not one you'd created yourself.

All of your old data ought to be on the H: disk, as you previously said your data was on , so presumably you've been able to save anything you needed.

Robm1955

No, unfortunately, there is some data on the G: (formerly C) drive, which is suddenly RAW. Don't know what's gone wrong. The data which used to be the D drive is still accessable.