xp on a 320gb hard disk stops working when reverted from sp2 to sp1

S

secfan

New Member
hey, my computer was originally working alright, with windows xp pro installed on a 320gb hard disk (however without sp2, xp only supported hard disks upto 170gb or soemthing, so i could only regain the other remainin space by creating another partition on it, only after installing sp2 on it, which is what i did)...

but the problem arose when i reverted from sp2 to sp1 (i only did that because one of my software was outdated and didnt support sp2, and i forgot the fact that my hdd was only "supported" on sp2), and from then i couldnt start my computer, and when i put the 320gb hdd on another computer with sp2, it said that the hdd was not formatted (and looking at disk manager, it said that the partition in which xp was isntalled on (the 170gb one) was empty, and the other partition which i used to regain the remaining space became unpartitioned)...

in any case i seemed to have lost all the data on my hdd, unless someone can figure a way to revert what i have done??? please any help would be appreciated :)
 
well to start with, xp was never limited by the 137gb partition size, last one I know of that was is ME. And no outdated software should make you have to revert to sp1, everything ought to be backwards compatible between the security packs, they're not different os's or anything. But reverting to sp1 could definitely cause problems, did for me awhile back. I had sp1 forever, decided to get sp2, but couldn't from Microsoft.com (my serial wasn't exactly mine). SO i downloaded it off another site, installed it and ran my computer. It started doing some just weird stuff I didn't like, for instance my desktop icons might not show up, so I tried reverting to sp1. The computer supposedly did so, but upon restart, all sorts of things were messed up, like outside of safe mode, all I wold see is my desktop background and nothing else, no toolbar or anything. So I had to reformat. Back to your question, I would try the hard drive in a computer other than the one you already did cause unless you formatted, there should be something on there.
 
Windows XP, without any SP's, limits the hard drive to 137GB because of something to do with "48-bit Logical Block Addressing Support for ATA (IDE), Serial ATA or ATAPI disc drives." Windows XP SP1 fixes this however. So i dont think the SP is the problem.
 
well i "uninstalled" sp2 from the add/remove programs thingy... dunno if that just reverted back to sp1 or removed all sp's completely... but in any case, windows could never start after it was uninstaled... and yes, i have tried the hdd on another computer as that was how i was able to see how the partitions had been changed... and using chkdsk on xp recovery from the setup brings up a message like "chkdsk found unrecoverable errors"... any other suggestions??? i want to avoid formatting if possible :/
 
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try running a linux live cd and mounting the partition to see if is empty or not, as that will definately show you whats on it (unless its currupt).

Rowan.
 
and where cna i get a copy of this??? or is there another easier method, or just a simple YES or NO on whether ANY data can be recovered in this situation??? cos thats all i wanna know... thanks
 
try knoppix (google it) and download the live cd iso, burn it to a cd and boot up using it. google mounting in linux if you need help doing that.

Hope it Helps, Rowan.
 
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