hard disk crash......need help

my 500gb western digtial hdd crashed recently and i lost about 400gb of data :'(
when i say crashed i mean pc would boot but the windows wouldnt load, i tried booting with my xp cd and it said that i have 2 drives- 1mb unallocated space, c: unpartitioned or damaged(i originally had 4 partitions)
then i reformatted the whole thing and reinstalled windows, now its working fine

before this happened i never used to get any errors or had any trouble booting

now what i want to know is, why did it happen when my hard disk seemed to be perfectly healthy?? and how do i prevent it from happening again

please help

Mohnishgs said:
now what i want to know is, why did it happen when my hard disk seemed to be perfectly healthy??

How do you know ur HDD is perfectly healthy?
Just because its not showing any more problem?
Don't be so sure.

Run checkdsk in all drives and note if it shows any bad sector in any drive.

and how do i prevent it from happening again

You can't prevent it.

Though u can try something but these are not full proof.
Use UPS with spike guard.
Don't make any illegal shutdown.
Don't open it from its place and stick to any one's PC.

^^He said everything....!! Nothing to add.

Besides u can try sum recovery sw's to get ur old data back....!!

krishnandu.sarkar said:
Besides u can try sum recovery sw's to get ur old data back....!!

I don't think he should even think about getting back data.

He has already formatted it and made partition.
If he is even able to recover any data it would be less than 5% of total data.

Hmm.....I didn't knew it. I've heard tat we can get our data back even aftr formatting as in this case. (Not 100% of course). So is it rite??? Or just a myth???

krishnandu.sarkar said:
Hmm.....I didn't knew it. I've heard tat we can get our data back even aftr formatting as in this case. (Not 100% of course). So is it rite??? Or just a myth???

U can get back data(whole) only if the partition is untouched after the tragedy.

But, when u mess up with the partition table its very tough to get back data.
He can try with "Recover My files" (paid) and "Recuva" (Free and good) for this purpose.
He will get some amount but not enough.

Ya I was also talking about Recover My Files.

And thnx for the info.....!!

I ALSO FACED THE SAME PROBLEM....
WHEN I HAD INSTALLED SOLARIS ON MY LAPTOP MY FILE SYSTEM GOT CHANGED.....
I FORMATED THE ENTIRE DISK TWICE...RE-PARTITIONED IT...INSTALLED XP-SP2...

BUT STILL I WAS ABLE TO RECOVERED EVERYTHING WITH "GetDataBack" very Good Soft...
But you can't recover data once you over write the sectors on disk....
It recovers data from each sector and created the as it is directory....