here's the story:

I have 200GB maxtor harddrive (as a slave)... th thing is that windows recognizes the correct drive size only along with special software provided by maxtor... without it windows shows it as a 137 GB harddrive... before formatting the primary master, I made backups on the 200GB maxtor (in total amount of 157 GB)...
now after formatting, windows told that some of the files are corrups or unreachable (probably because of the reason that I hadn't this drive expansion software installed)... after a restart the scandisk program appeared automatically and started to delete some (over 60000) index entries - then recovered them (atleast the messages showed so)...
now with everything nearly working, windows shows me that 51GB of the 200GB drive is used - eventhough there SHOUL be 157GB of data...

any clues or help in such kind of situation?.. I mean... when windows deleted the indexes does it mean that the files physically excist on the drive and can they be recovered in any possible way?..

or what else should I do...

Regards to any kind of help...

Is the HD on FAT32 or NTFS? And Or have you ever changed it

it's been NTFS from the start... it has had only one format (the time after it was purchased)...

NTFS doesn't have a max drive size limit I don't think, so you should have been able to use all 200GB in one partition. Other than that, yes you can get tools to recover lost data. A Google search should get you started.

i had a similar problem, i bought a Maxtor 200gb ATA drive ages ago, my old one was 40gb, i plugged this one up (unplugged old one completely) and installed windows, but it only picked it up as 135gb (or so) and apparently its because my XP CD didnt have SP1 slipstreamed with it (Pre-SP1 doesn't support anything larger than 135gb or so) but i'm living with 135gb for now, tbh, by the time i personally fill this drive, it'll be time for a format, and by then i'll have SP1 slipstreamed with the XP disc so i'll get my 200gb.

try reading up on how to slipstream SP1 with the XP Pro CD (or Home if thats what you have)

the 135 Gb is a limit that is there due to historical reasons, and other dodgy things that I won't explain now. The fact is that if you don't have (or didn't have) the drivers installed, your disk is a 135 Gb one, so scandisk detects that some indexes are wrong (ie: they're indexes that point to files phisically stored upper from the 135 Gb boundary). In this case, scandisk changes the indexes so they point inside the 135 Gb zone. This makes you see you have 50 Gb used instead of 150.

The files are (may be) still in the disk, i mean, phisically they're still there, however they're in an unknown place, because no index points to them. The only way to recover them is installing the maxor driver again, and using some program like norton undelete or similar (if such tools still exist for ntfs partitions). However I'm not very optimist. Once scandisk has touched your MFT (where indexes are) I don't think you'll be able to recover those files.

About what Kao said about SP1: That may or may not be a possible sollution. I'm not sure.

One thing more: Are you sure your BIOS supports 135+ Gb disks?

And the last thing: I strongly recommend making partitions on disks. The bigger the disk is, the better making partitions is. For example, with a 200 Gb disk, I'd do at least 4 partitions (very probably a couple more) of about 30 - 50 Gb. In that way, you help to reduce fragmentation, keep your files more organized and always have a place where place files before a format on the partition where Windows is installed is made.

I'd go with a file recovery program.  When I upgraded my 20GB (Yes, 20GB ) Quantam Fireball to an 80GB Western Digital(WD), WD provided a disk titled "Data LifeGuard Tools", if maxtor provides anything similar it should be very easy to recover your files and such.  Unfortuantly, Data LifeGuard Tools dont seem to work on Non-Western Digital Hard drives.

But i'd definatly check and see if maxtor provided anything similar.

thanks for all the replies... today I'll try a program called ease recovery or something like that it was... rating for that program is higher than other alikes... as it says: most of the times the recovery range is up to 99.9%... sounds mystical but I'm so desparate that it's good enough for me...

Maxtor too have a program. Its called "PowerMax" and will scan your Maxtor drive for errors and recommend what you do next. I have recently had to run this on an 80gb drive of mine, and its now being sent back under warranty.

Chris