Hey, I was wondering if anyone could offer some advice on this one.

First of all: thanks to everyone on this forum, it's been an invaluable resource over the last week getting my hackintosh working. I've run into a fairly serious problem now though, hopefully someone can 'pull one out the bag' for me...

I got my Kalyway 10.5.2 install working great, patched the binaries, dual screen, everything seemed great. I plugged in the music-filled SATA HDD from when it was an XP machine, and OSX mounted it fine, but only as read-only. I did some research and used NTFS-3G for OSX to mount the drive as readable AND writeable, and everything was fine. Drive worked, everything accessible, all good, so I used this method to load the XP iTunes library file, and this all worked. hurrah...

I booted up the Mac this morning, and to my horror, everything on the music drive (except some Mac directories starting with '.') was gone. Scary feeling..

The drive usage (98% used, 3GB free, or somewhere around there) is still shown correctly though, so I have some hope of recovering the data. The drive is back in the windows machine now, and it's still the same, nothing miraculously re-appeared.

I know that I shouldn't write anything to the drive until the data is recovered.

I have a backup, but it's from August so I've lost quite a bit of music that I bought online, as well as some other stuff that was on that drive.

Any ideas on recovering the data, bearing in mind that the disk usage appears to be correct? As far as I can tell, a bug in NTFS-3G has written the allocation table (or whatever it is in NTFS) incorrectly, effectively hiding the data from view, but no disk-wiping operations have occured so it should still be there,.. somewhere..

I know there are disk recovery utils out there, but I've no idea which ones will help, and which ones might make the situation worse.

Essentially what I'm looking for, if such a thing exists, is a way to recover the allocation table rather than the files themselves (which are hopefully still intact).

Many thanks in advance, I'm feeling quite sick at losing this music

Ian


p.s. if it's important:
AMD Athlon 3200
Gigabyte ga-kn8-9 motherboard
2GB RAM
Geforce 6600 256mb