Spending money on software should be the last step. If the disk was working fine before, no spinup issues or clicking noises, there's no reason XP's tools can't get the job done for you.
Posted on 12/16/2007 5:02:24 PM PST by perfect stranger
My 200gig HD is partitioned as 2 drives, one for the OS and one for storage.
Friday night I put the 200 into an external HD enclosure and since then the second partition will not show up.
Is there a way to get that information back?
And by "noticing" the second partition, is it even visible from the disk management tools (diskmgmt.msc)? If it's not, then this isn't an issue of just reassigning a drive letter but basically a drive that needs actual data recovery.
Spending money on software should be the last step. If the disk was working fine before, no spinup issues or clicking noises, there's no reason XP's tools can't get the job done for you.
So, do you have any hard drives in the computer now or is the only drive the 200G that you have in the external enclosure? Did you boot from that USB drive?
I couldn’t get any of the videos to work.
How do you boot from a USB?
How is the external enclosure attached to the PC? USB? Fireware?
USB
That cannot be true.
I'm hoping that since Disk Management could find it, it will show up next time I reboot- but it doesn't.
Was there a letter assigned to that partition in question. You may simply need to assign a letter to that drive for it to be accessable within Windows again.
I don’t have answers, but will
BUMP for publicity
Ok now I have Spinrite. How can I get it to scan the drive that it doesn’t recognise?
No big deal. I like to start fresh on a drive once or twice a year(sometimes even 14-20 times a year).
You’re kidding me. I’m doing a 500gb drive right now that had the partition deleted. I’m using spinrite and it’s showing recovered files already at only .8% of the scan. Of course, on a drive of this size, it’ll take 10 days to finish. LOL
Sorry you had to go through all of this. Maybe it’s because you kept trying to reboot it in windows?
Anyway, Steve’s girl in sales will give you your money back if it’s before 30 days.
Good luck.
With Spinrite, once it recovers data, does it appear the same as it was located on the drive before it crashed, or would it be like the Ontrack software I have used before that has a bunch of orphan folders or duplicate folders and files with a hit or miss if the actual file is correct. I had an old Maxtor drive with a bunch of mp3’s that crashed due to the partition table becoming corrupt since I was using it in an older computer with DDO installed to trick the BIOS into reading such a large drive. I remember several Mp3’s were all screwy like say Deep Purples Smoke on the Water would morph into a song by the Beatles. That to me is not good data recovery. Also the file names were all renamed like “aiwyr453512” would be what used to be Black Sabbath - Born Again - 1983 - Digital Bitch.mp3. If spinrite does that it’s not worth even trying.
I never tried to reboot it in windows. It was a slave drive.
I’ve had them come out all screwy and some exactly as they were. I think it depends on the issue that caused the problem. It seems to me, if it’s just a deleted partition, and no other recovery efforts were under taken, then they come out pretty nice. Usually in files right under the folders they were in.
OTOH, if it was a hard crash, or someone keeps trying to fix it or rebooting it a lot, they come out a bit scrambled.
It wasn’t connected to a windows machine when you tried to get to your files? Because every time you do that, windows indexes it and writes several files to it.
That’s what I meant, not that you were trying to boot off of it. :)
How can Windows write to a partition that Windows says isn’t there?
Ok, now I’m confused. Are we talking about a USB external hard drive with more than one partition on it?
And this HARD DRIVE, as opposed to a partition, was not recognized at all? Even as “Not Allocated” in local disk management? [START>RUN>DISKMGMT.MSC]
There are many ways for the source drive to be damaged. Windows will often try to ‘repair’ found errors on drives that are slaved and therefore will make changes to media that should not be altered. Windows performs automatic, “data house-keeping” (organizing) of hard drives and can use any cluster it detects as being available. This may overwrite data you are trying to recover.
Even with write block, booting to windows can be risky for a damaged, slaved source drive. This is the main reason that slaving is not an appropriate method of data recovery, even though, in many instances it does allow for data retrieval.
All windows needs is about 30kb of space, or less, to hide a pointer in, or mark the drive, and you’re done. You may not even see that windows has recognized it, and it may not until it’s finished scanning it, which is when it marks it as good or bad.
I’m not sure what you did, or how you did it. But, if you ever want to slave a former “C” drive again, always boot the machine with the new drive ONLY, restart it, and then add the former “C” drive. Windows will immediately re index it and change it’s pointers, flags, and update the MBR of the master drive.
Here’s a sample of an MBR (decoded):
MOV SI,07C1B ;set SI (source index) to 7C1B
MOV DI,0061B ;set DI (destination index) to 061B
PUSH AX ;PUSH AX for segment for RETF to 0
PUSH DI ;PUSH DI for offset for RETF = 061B
MOV CX,01E5 ;1E5 bytes to copy
REP MOVSB ;Copy the MBR
RETF ;PULL 0000:061B off stack and JMP to MBR
That’s 330 bytes. Not even one kilobyte.
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