HDD partitions incorrectly recognized

[moot]

It looks like the disks were damaged or formatted somehow.. I ran a fresh install of XP-SP2 on one of the working partitions, worked out fine except for nvidia chipset installer hanging at the last part of install (removing temp setup files). Rebooted fine. Failed to start windows (disk error before windows loaded) when I rebooted another time with one of the flaky drives connected. 
I'd tried to install this cheapo IDE controller card I was given for free, and hooked the drives up to that to see if it worked.. It didn't, so I rebooted and removed the card. The drives were hooked up to that for 10min tops. That's the only thing that happened to those drives since I'd last seen them working.  Word to the wise I guess....  )(&^)&($@^ cheap no-name made in china pos.. 500GB of backup lost.

[FLOTSOM]

if it was formatted or partially formatted you may still be able to recover it with a recovery program.

there are alot of programs out there that say they can fix formatted drives. dont know which are good and which arent, but it may be worth looking into.

FLOTSOM

[moot]

Yep, gonna go find a specialist and have them see if they can recover what was on em.. There's literaly everything I've done over the last 10 years. All my work on Matlab, CAD apps, Excel sheets, random scripts for everything from engineering projects to handy windows batch programs... Tens of thousands of astronomy pics, all my music and movies, articles and books, yadda yadda.  I don't even wanna think about it.

[Kermit de frog]

  m00t, the good news is there are programs and companies that can recover your data still.  It seems as though it's only been partitioned.  Sometimes these programs are free to prove they work, but then you have to pay $30-50 to actually be allowed to move this recovered files to a working hard drive.  Or you could send it in and it may cost you hundreds of dollars.  If the data was priceless to me, I'd send it in.  The IDE controller you put in later did not lose your data, a faulty windows installation did this.

  A word of advice for users whom may be reading this in the future.  Using Win XP cd before SP1 does not support hard drives larger than ~131GB.  If you continue with this, you risk losing data on all connected hard drives that are larger than ~131GB.  If you notice windows installer not recognizing your true hard drive size, stop and consult help.  Trying to use windows disk manager to fix the problem wll make things more complicated.

[moot]

I see, thanks. I haven't actualy done anything wrong with the drives, except for plugging them in thru the IDE controller. Didnt do anything with the Disk Management, or in the blue screen windows setup.  I just plugged em in after the install was done.  I never tried to fix them directly.