Entire partition table wiped !!!

[JohnE]

My primary master hard drive (a standard EIDE) is about 40GB and is split into 5 partitions. Three of them are bootable (Windows XP, Win 98 and Windows 2000 respectively) and the other 2 are formatted as FAT32 and configured as drives D: and E: (both drives are visible to all 3 OS’s). I also have a further EIDE drive (the secondary master) which is much bigger (about 160GB). The large drive is mainly used for backups – although it contains a single partition of about 31GB which is configured as drive F: (again, F: is visible to all 3 OS’s but I rarely use it).

A few days ago I needed to change my motherboard. Within a day or two, XP and Win2K were up and running but I hadn’t yet got around to Windows 98. What stopped me was the fact that I noticed something very strange about drive F:

XP and 2K could both see it. They both agreed it was 31GB. They both agreed it had 18GB of files and 13GB of free space and they both showed the same volume name. Also, if I changed the volume name, both OS’s reported the changed name so they were obviously looking at the same volume. However, they completely disagreed about the number of files on the drive. Windows XP said there were over 5000 files but Win2K said less than 4000. Even just in the root directory, XP said there were 605 files whereas 2K said only 283. Both OS’s were configured not to hide any files and running scandisk (under both OS’s) revealed no problems. After scratching my head for a few hours, I came to the conclusion that the FAT must be somehow corrupted. Although I didn’t need anything from Drive F:, I copied all its files onto a spare partition (on the same drive) and reformatted F:. Booting up into Windows 2000, I checked that Win2K could see the correct number of files and I set about copying all of them back to the newly formatted F: After only a few files I saw a message box saying “Error 1392” and had to re-boot…. And that’s when the problems started. The entire partition table for my 160GB drive (16 partitions!) had been totally wiped!!!

Fortunately, Partition Magic has recovered everything except for drive F: and the spare partition but I don’t understand how this happened. Does Windows 2000 have a problem with large drives? If so, why has it never shown up until now? Could the problem be with my new motherboard? I think I’ve loaded all the drivers (the mobo is an Asus A7V8X-X) but should I have loaded some special drivers for handling a 160GB drive? My old mobo used the same chipset and I don’t remember having to load anything special. How can an entire drive get completely wiped like this???