Hi guys. I remembered this site and figured maybe someone could help me out. Here's my story:

Recently my sister b0rk3d her computer up and my dad asked me to get her another one. He gave me $200 So I figured I would get a barebones setup, put all my hardware in it, and put all her old hardware in my current PC. (Just for your info, it was an Athlon XP 3000 with PC Chips mobo). I know PC Chips sucks but I figured as long as it worked, no biggie.

It didn't. I sent it back and received it once again. I got a Burn-In diagnostics log saying they tested it and everything was straight.

Anyway I gave the PC to my cousin he said he would take it to his IT job (he does PR or something up there) and someone would fix it. I have it returned to me and basically I was robbed, half of my RAM is missing, GPU, SPU, and another great thing, it now has a Celeron 2.0 ghz. Here's the worst part. I gave him my HD with it. My HD (120 gigs) had two partitions. c:\ for OS and Program Files and d:\ for music, downloads, documents, etc.

For some reason the asshole decided to delete my d:\ partition too. Well I was fairly alarmed to find this out and frantically started asking around for help. Some people told me that you may be able to recover files from a lost partition. So I got myself some software (Stellar NTFS Partition recovery? or something) and go to work. Although it couldn't get everything back (the pictures of me and my girlfriend are gone ) it did get most of my music back. Here's the problem, a good 95% of it doesn't play in any media player, Winamp, WMP, foobar, etc... Is there anything I can do? I would appreciate some help.

First Step: Kick your cousin´s butt. And never give your comp. to anyone just like that again. I would definitely seek and destroy anybody who does such a thing.

Second Step: mmm try PowerQuest´s Partition Magic. I don´t know if it cand do the job but it might be able to do it.

There are also other programs like "Recover4 All", "PC File Inspector Recovery" etc., you could try them out.

OK I just looked it up. It's owned by Norton now so that's the one I should get?

Norton Partition Magic 8.0?

Yes that´s it. God damn it, those Symantec guys are going to buy the moon one of these days.

Use EasyRecovery Pro from Ontrack: http://www.ontrack.com/

Probably you'll be able to recover some files back.

Personally, I wouldn't add any new data to the drive, if your goal is to get something off of it. Depending on how much your stuff is worth to you, sending the drive to a professional data recovery firm like DriveSavers is probably the way to go. Note: I've never used DriveSavers or anything like them, I just remembered their name as an example.

I prefaced that suggestion with "decide how much your stuff is worth to you" because services like that won't be cheap. It will easily be in the hundreds of dollars, and probably in the thousands. But then again, maybe that's a small price to pay for something that could be irrevocably lost.

If that fails, Megaman's step #1 sounds pretty good to me. Then, start working on your data backup plan.

I'd also suggest to do as little as possible with the messed up drive (preferably nothing at all) until you have decided on a way to rescue your data, and even then it would be wise to not modify the contents of the drive if at all possible.

BTW, you want to search for similar topics, there have been a few threads like this in the past.