I misunderstood, you just reinstalled windows.

My situation was when I was first installing the hard drive (which sounds more like what aguire described), windows wouldnt format it as one partition.

But if you can access it, cant you copy stuff off it ? 

it shows up alongside all my other HDDs, but when i try to open it, windows insists it's not formatted.
when i use the 'computer management' program, it shows up as 2 partitions, 128mb unformatted and 170mb unallocated.

i just can't understand how that happened or where all the data went.

is it possible for windows to some how not be reading it correctly?
the drive is less than a year old, and i highly doubt it's broken already. it was working perfectly fine a couple of days ago. 

And check it out?

There are NTFS drivers for DOS, and liveCDs of various flavours that could do the job. 

What does your BIOS now show for that drive?

Maybe it is set for the wrong size - automatic detection may have failed for some reason. If so, you should be able to tell it what is fitted. 

You have checked the master/slave and primary/secondary setup, and not inadvertantly re-connected the drives in the wrong order?

If the data on the drive is not backed-up somewhere, and you did not reformat the drive, don't give up. The data is still on the drive and it can be recovered. We just need to find the right solution to the problem. 

yep, master/slave jumper settings are still correct.

the bios is very wierd, at least to me. it's an asus p5w dh deluxe, and instead of what would seem normal to me (ie: primary ide master/slave for the 2 P-ATA HDDS and secondary ide master/slave for my two cdrom drives), it shows my S-ATA HDDs are IDE HDDs, complete with master/slave settings! o.0
also, the P-ATA HDDs don't even show up in the list (the list looks like this:
Primary IDE Master/Slave (Both CDRom Drives)
Third IDE Master/Slave (Both S-ATA HDDs)
Fourth IDE Master/Slave (Nothing)

there's no secondary ide master/slave set.
BUT the P-ATA drives do show up in the boot sequence menu.

Also, according to what i've seen in the bios, and what's written in the manual, you can't manually enter HDD information like in older motherboards.

i get the feeling tech has moved on, and left me behind. o.o 

OK. It seems that lots of people have had lots of problems with this board.

Here's one thread that mention some HD problems and solutions:
http://www.thepatri0t.net/2006/10/14/asus-p5b-deluxe-problems-solution/

And another that goes into a RAID setup:
http://forumz.tomshardware.com/hardware/P5W-DH-Deluxe-RAID-ftopict201524.html

I'm on an old Asus and when I had problems with an new 300G drive, I simply changed the setting in the BIOS. It seems as though it is not quite so straightforward now.

I'm probably not being much help, sorry. 

the first article you linked was for a different motherboard, but i'm updating the jmicron drivers like it says anyway.

i also tried what blackdog said and got a bootdisk made to read ntfs from dos from here: http://www.ntfs.com/boot-disk.htm
when i tried to take a look at the drive in question, i got the message: "Error reading sector #0 or Boot Sector is invalid".

so i thought maybe the boot sector got broken or something. apparently, ntfs also stores a copy of the boot sector at "the end of the logical volume" according to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/153973 . i tried to figure out what they are talking about with dskprobe.exe, but i didn't have much luck... this kind of stuff is beyond me.

in anycase, gonna restart and see if the jmicron driver update helped. (wanted to write this down before i lost all the webpages again :P) 

it didn't help. :\

i'm running out of ideas here. :S 

wierdness... the new jmicron drivers i installed also installed some kind of raid configuration program. the wierd part is that it seems like it's made to make a raid out of my ide hard drives! is that even possible? what's going on here? o.0 

Did you manage to solve the problem?

If so, can you comment on why you chose that particular board - It seems to get good reviews, albeit that some users have had problems similar to your own.

I am going to upgrade to an Intel Core2 6800 processor and this board looks suitable. 

i didn't manage to fix it yet, sadly. i'm still holding out, and haven't reformatted it yet, but i stuck the drive into another machine and it showed up the same way. i'll probably end up formatting it soon. :S at least there wasn't anything irreplaceable on it.

in anycase, i chose this board for a few reasons...

first, i wanted one that could do xfire. i haven't gone there yet, but i want the option, so that when i recover from this expenditure, i can pick up another video card and go crazy.

also, i'm kind of a pack rat when it comes to data, and i like to keep all my stuff quickly accessible on multiple hard drives, and not burn DVDs, so having support for 3 S-ATA HDDs was great, as well as the possibility of having 2 additional S-ATA HDDs (with asus 'ez-backup').
also, my last motherboard had a decidely short number of usb ports (2...)
now i can hook up the game pad, joystick, mouse, keyboard and my ipod along with other stuff like flash drives all at once.

finally, according to some reviews and from what i've been told, it's a good board for overclocking, and though i haven't done much yet, i was looking over the bios, and there seems to be quite a bit of freedom there.

if anyone's interested, i'm currently running:
core 2 duo e6300
asus p5w dh deluxe
1gb 800/pc6400
radeon 1950pro 256mb

this machine absolutely destroys some older games. WoW runs at 60-100+fps in most outdoor areas, and never dips below 30-40 in crowded areas (shattrath...), D3 (and other d3 engine games) are almost always maxed out at 60fps at highest settings (1024x768)

i have been having trouble with stalker though... i keep getting a lot of disk activity as if the game was running out of ram. it's actually worse performance than before... go figure. :P i may try again by installing it without the patch... we'll see.
runs the pc version of jade empire very smoothly too, although, it's kind of an older game.

haven't tried many newer games yet (they were all installed on the hdd that is giving me trouble, and haven't had the chance to reinstall everything). also really want to see how it handles oblivion with the dynamic lighting and huge outdoor areas with all the grass and stuff.


i do definatly recommend this board, if only because of all the features it has.
i'm sure you've read this, but in case you haven't: http://www.hothardware.com//viewarticle.aspx?articleid=863 

what is xfire ? I thought it was some messager type thing for games but that last post by necros seems to indicate a video card related thing. 

that thing where you connect 2 cards together.

it's really called crossfire, but i'm lazy and tired. :P 

It seems to run quite poorly across the board necros, dont think its anything to do with your hardware.

Strangely though, if you max out all the settings, the multiplayer will run smooth as silk, yet single player runs like a dogs arse :( Must be some slightly crappy single player code in there slowing everything down. 

this is something else. i mean, it's unplayable, not just poor performance. :P 

cheers.

sounds like SLI for nvidia cards. 

Thanks for the info - it was helpful.

I may not go for the 6800 as it is a lot more expensive (in the UK) then the 67 or 66.

I'll have to see what the US price is. 

Newegg have the E6700 @ $509 (�258)

And I was in the States three weeks ago. I think I missed a trick there :( 

core 2 duo prices apparently dropped recently, so I'm upgrading to a e6600 (best bang for buck for conroe atm), and a 8800gts 320mb 8-)

Also, necros: if you cant get the drive going, try to recreate the partition in your chosen size(s) without formatting, windows may not do it but lot of other disk utilities will. At least that way you can typically run any freeware data recovery application and get almost all of your critical data back.

That being said, due to this happening to me several times over the years, and with harddrives being so cheap, I now keep everything I want to keep on a 250gb mirrored sata RAID array, with periodic backups of critical stuff to an external. Highly recommended. 

Guess i should have looked at the timestamps of those posts before replying. 

I have absolutely no clue what hardware is up to these days. GeForces are numbered between 8 and 9 thousand now, Radeons apparently rolled over at 10k and are back to being numbered 1000-something. Have they invented AGP Express yet and forced everyone to buy new motherboards and everything again? What about RAM, what number do they have after the DDDR now? 32? I'm sure there's a billion new CPU socket types I have to make sure I match also. Anyone keep their finger on the pulse of all this dumb shit?

I like the independence and control of building my own machine, and that's about it. The rest is a complete pain. :) 

It's a great time to buy a new system. AMD have been making great CPUs for years now and are currently cheap-as, and Intel's finally ditched the ^%$#* P4 and their Core 2 Duo is a top notch processor.

With AMD, there's still 3 desktop sockets, and it's a little confusing.
If you want to use your AGP & DDR ram,
go for the old socket 754 or the newer socket
939 (make sure it has AGP though). If you're building a new system or want to have an upgradeable system, - socket AM2 is AMD's main platform, but it needs DDR2 memory, and PCI express (PCIe) Video.

If you've got lots of money and don't mind supporting chipzilla the Core 2 Duo is the bomb, with huge on-chip caches and a proper design. Just make sure you don't get confused by their marketing and buy a "dual core" pentium D. These are still based on the rats-arse Pentium 4.

(AMD also has a new generation CPU on the horizon. Their quad cores may even beat out the core 2's , but production is probably still a while away.)

OS wise - stay away from Fista if you can, it ~is~ beautiful (http://chalain.livejournal.com/43015.html) but is riddled with DRM and the usual MS shit, and can even have major problems just copying files (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/15/vistas_long_goodbye_continues/comments/).
NV and ATI are also having problems just ~making~ drivers for it.

Thats what i reckon... Dunno about vid cards though. They are still making new AGP cards, so it's not dead yet. 

http://chalain.livejournal.com/43015.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/15/vistas_long_goodbye_continues/comments/ 

yeah, I put Vista Home on a pc I assembled for my aunt and cousin, in may. It was very slow to extract zip files for some reason! (With the inbuilt archive program.)

Also the ADSL connection at my aunt's place had some delay so they couldn't activate the windows in time and now it's locked up. I think XP had the same thing though. I hope they get it sorted out with a few phone calls to microsoft.

Also, I had trouble having the programs to appear in the menu. I installed em as admin but they didn't appear to other users and I dunno how or what I should do, I think I made some shortcuts by hand in the end.

There are not that many 64-bit native programs yet it seems. They haven't even compiled Opera for that, even when it's available for probably your kitchen microwave.
There is a 64bit Firefox port called "Minefield". Didn't try it yet.