Hard Disk Drive not recognized

[justrain]

Hi, I have an Asus G50V which was using both Vista and Fedora c10, I wanted to restore my Vista partition with vendor disks but before any installation could happen the laptop crashed and by some means it deleted both my Fedora and Vista partitions, I checked on the system BIOS and it seems to still be able to locate some elements from those partitions within my HD drive, thus I decided to run Fedora from a DVD to try and install it into my whole disk but when I reach to the part on the installation where you select on what partition to install the OS it just doesn't show any partitions at all (which makes me guess it is not even recognizing my HDD at all).

I also attempted to use the Disk Managment toll but an error promt appears saying "there are no filesystems which you are allowed to mount or unmount. Contact your administrator." The Disk Usage Analyzer also doesn't seem to identify my hard disk.

I don't know if my partition table got somehow deleted or something like as even on the "About this computer" information, it just shows information about the DVD from where it is loading the Fedora OS.

Also, on this computer I have to HDDs which one is free of any OS and I use it only for storing data but it is not even listed on the media directory.....

I don't really care if I loose all my data, which probably I just have, I just was wondering if there is like an utility or something which might help me detect and format my drives so that I can install an OS...

Thanks in advance for your help,

[stoat]

I wanted to restore my Vista partition with vendor disks...

I don't know if my partition table got somehow deleted or something like as even on the "About this computer" information, it just shows information about the DVD from where it is loading the Fedora OS.Hello justrain,

Well, I don't really know why Anaconda does not detect your hard drives after if has installed Fedora on one of them previously. Sorry. But about the partitions, generally those restore disks that return a computer's drive to its original factory condition will destroy anything on the drive. And they usually give a warning about that. It happens that way because they recreate even the original partitions. Not just the operating system. To re-install just the operating system without plowing under everything on the drive, you would need an actual Vista installation disk.



I don't really care if I loose all my data, which probably I just have, I just was wondering if there is like an utility or something which might help me detect and format my drives so that I can install an OS...First, you can try recovering your old partitions with a free utility called TestDisk. You can find it easily with Google. It comes in several versions. I keep the DOS version handy on a floppy and a bootable CD. It's even in the Fedora repos for yum installing it in Fedora. Anyway. iIt's not a beautiful GUI app, but it's very handy sometimes.

Next, if you give up on recovery, you can try the free partition manager called the GParted LiveCD to delete existing partitions, recreate new ones, etc. It can also be found easily with Google. It's a live Linux OS itself, so it would be interesting to see what it has to say about your MIA hard drives.

[justrain]

Hey thanks for the reply, well apparently both HDD were just somehow erased or something as the GParted tool just shows me a big 3 gig unallocated partition... thanks, I now seem to be ablo to load a couple of OS again!