Hard disk Drive

Replaced my master disk, but the slave drive where I kept my data is now displaying as raw with about 2 mb, but it is an 80gb drive. Is there any way I can retrieve my data as my backups are not up to date?

80 GByte drives do not metamorphosise into 2 MByte drives, so the drive you are seeing is probably not your slave drive. Look in the BIOS settings or Windows Disk Manager (Right click, My Computer, select Manage then Disk Manager). Sometimes when you format a hard drive there is a bit of unallocated space left over. Disk Manager will tell if your mystery 2 MByte drive really is a second physical drive or just a second partition on your new Master Disk.

Yes I looked at it on BIOS and it says it is the slave drive. I have also taken it out and put it in another computer and that confirmed it. Before I swopped the master drive out, I did try to create a 4th partition on the slave with Partition Magic so that I could copy some files to it from my old Master drive. Maybe that somehow caused it?

Partition Magic, Yeah, that wonderfully powerful tool that in the hands of novices will happily kill your drive. Presumably you tried shrinking one partition to make space for another? Well, instead you killed the partition table.
All may not be lost - there are partition recovery tools out there, though personally I've only had real success using PartedMagic - which is a Linux tool (you need to boot from a Linux CD)
You could try this tool http://www.partition-recovery.com/ (note its not free and I've never used it myself)
The other option is to try booting from a BARTPE CD with the GETDATABACK for NTFS plugin and scan the drive for recoverable files. Again, you'l have to pay for that - and also you'll have to teach yourself how to make a BARTPE CD.
Otherwise its time to ask for help

I've had quite a lot of success with a program called Zero Assumption Recovery. It does seem to work in situations where the partition table is lost. This program is not free, however.

One weakness of the tool is that it may recover multiple copies of the same file and some spurious files as well as the real ones, so the total size of the recovered files may exceed the capacity of the hard drive. Thus you need another bigger hard drive to write your recovered files to, so you can then sort the wheat from the chaff.

Thanks for your suggestions. I used Zero Assumption Recovery and found that the disk had lost all the partitions and put the data into the 2.5 mb. Obviously most of the files were ruined. I am now considering my next move as it does not seem worth trawling through hundreds of files to see what I can retieve. Most of it is backed-up anyway, but there are a few files that I missed.

then at a rough guess what you are looking at is the partition table, metamorphosed into a partition. The act of doing which loses the traces of the real partitions. I had a laptop like this recently which I could not recover, but there must be a way of restoring the original partition table
Any suggestions gentlemen?

Are you sure you used ZAR correctly? You need it to work on the seemingly empty 79.998 GBytes of your corrupt hard drive, not the 0.002 GBytes partition. The data will still be there where you left it if it has not been overwritten. You just need ZAR to piece it all together without the aid of a partition table. Data does not get mysteriously shrunk and moved so I agree with Jon that what you are concentrating on is not the data itself but the remains of the partition table, the index not the contents.

Then, would you really need to trawl through hundreds of files? Surely all the ones you want have a .doc or .jpg or .mp3 or similar extension. So do a search on all the files you want to keep and sort them into folders, for later evaluation if you like.

When I am connecting my external hard drive to my computer, it doesn’t recognize it. I take out and again insert it, it’s not visible then also. Then, I searched it for in the disk management but found nothing. Please suggest what I can do now https://www.hptechsupportnumbers.com/blog/windows-detected-a-hard-disk-problem/

When I am connecting my external hard drive to my computer, it doesn’t recognize it. I take out and again insert it, it’s not visible then also. Then, I searched it for in the disk management but found nothing. Please suggest what I can do now https://www.hptechsupportnumbers.com/blog/windows-detected-a-hard-disk-problem/