At the verge of loosing my 94gig partition!!!

kensuguro · Post by **kensuguro** » Wed Apr 09, 2003 10:16 am

yikes!!! I had a freeze, and then after rebooting, my 94Gb partition seems to have some partition table errors!!! I'm in the process of getting some HD utilities but... well, I'll keep my fingers crossed. Wish me luck!!! Aaaaaaahhhhh!!!!!!!

siberiansun · Post by **siberiansun** » Wed Apr 09, 2003 10:42 am

GOOD LUCK!

John Cooper · Post by **John Cooper** » Wed Apr 09, 2003 10:50 am

The only effective backup strategy I've found is to buy a 2nd hard disk the same size, put both disks into removable "trays", and use "ghost" to completely dupe the entire disk. Then if you EVER have a problem, you swap back the prev disk, copy what you need (or dupe the entire disk back), etc.

Disk problems = no fun! Good luck man!
-John

borg · Post by **borg** » Wed Apr 09, 2003 12:10 pm

i remember atomic having fairly the same bad stuff happening about a year ago. i'd suggest getting in touch with him if he misses this post (which he won't of course

)

at0m · Post by **at0m** » Wed Apr 09, 2003 12:25 pm

Yeah, I went thru the same. :-/ I hope your drive will be fine, I lost a couple smaller partitions back then. Most of it was on cd, the latest wasn't. Took a week before everything was restored properly.

w_ellis · Post by **w_ellis** » Wed Apr 09, 2003 12:45 pm

Hi,

I had something similar happen to me a couple of weeks ago, although the actual drive died (IBM Deskstar!). Fortunately I only lost OS partitions, so nothing major that I hadn't backed up. However, while I was trying to recover anyway, I discovered that Norton Ghost could copy partitions. This meant that, since the disc that had broken would spin up for a little while, I could copy the data (not in a particularly good state) and recover at least some of it.

Also, XP/2000 auto-recovery should do the job if you've just got a problem with your MBR. Just put the install disc in and boot from that. Either use the recovery console, or let it do it automatically.

Good luck,
Will

kensuguro · Post by **kensuguro** » Wed Apr 09, 2003 1:51 pm

I have a hunch that scandisk /f ruined whatever that was intact by trying to fix thing with the wrong MBR.. shew.. I wonder what's up with my files. They seem to be there though.. Man, this is adventurous.
I'll be looking into quickly buying the norton package to see if that'll do any help. I was able to get an image of the partition (with a utility called R-Studio) only to find that the files were already corrupted. hmm.. doesn't look so good.
Seems pretty clear now that the MBR was mistakenly written with the crash. If only there was a way to reconstruct the MBR... I'd hope norton utils will do this, but I won't keep my hopes high.

Post by **garyb** » Wed Apr 09, 2003 6:26 pm

if the info is critical it can probably be saved.there are services that do this...might be pricey...don't do anything drastic,so that you can send the drive to be recovered if needed.

best wishes....

Post by **hubird** » Wed Apr 09, 2003 8:15 pm

good luck Ken!!!

paulrmartin · Post by **paulrmartin** » Wed Apr 09, 2003 8:56 pm

f..k, f..k, f..k... Chin up

Immanuel · Post by **Immanuel** » Thu Apr 10, 2003 11:50 am

Hi Kensuguru

I just searched thru a hardwareforum that I moderate, to see if I could find anything usefull for you. Here is a list of programs, that some people mention for getting data back:

GetDataBack
R-Studio
^- these where mentioned in a thread, where a person had formated the wrong partition. He fixed it with Norton.

Another user had lost acces to a 160GB drive. He could see the content with windows explorer, but he could not acces it due to some disk error. The following 3 programs where mentioned:
File Revial
Un Eraser
RestoreIT
The user regained his data with R-Studio

Another user had a 160GB hard drive, that he could not acces. He got the message: "This hard drive is not formatted. Fortmat y/n?" He chose n (no) and regained 98.99% of his data R-Studio.

I hope some of it helps you. It is generally adviced NOT to defrag a hurt hard drive.

kensuguro · Post by **kensuguro** » Thu Apr 10, 2003 2:57 pm

I found the solution. It had to do with the fact that I was using a 200Gb drive connected to Promise's Ultra100.

Anyhow, it turned out that XP had replaced my Ultra100 drivers with older (non 200Gb compliant) drivers, and so I couldn't access the partition that was over the 160Gb(was it?) limit of the older drives. The data appeared corrupt, but everything was still there in place. Just "seen" wrong from XP.

So, after hassling with a bunch of tools, I replaced the old drivers with new ones, and everything was back to normal. Sheww!

Anyhow, all is cool now. Thanks for everybody's concern!

In the course of looking for disk utilities, I've tried:

R-Studio, which could see the files, could make an image of the non-seeable partition, but could not recover files from it.

Norton Utilities which pretty much didn't do much because basically, XP couldn't see my drive. Seems like a good solution if you have general problems tho.

Test Disk was pretty direct and very logical. It can write straight to your MBR. Also, it can scan for previously existant partitions. Free.

Just as some reference, here's how the partition table thing works.
Partition table is stored in MBR.
Partition table consists of where a partition starts, and where it ends. So there are 2 entries for each partition. (the start and end)
When these numbers don't match with each other, or don't match the preceeding or following partition, you've got trouble. Also, the partition info may not match the Disk Geometry Information.
In either case, you can manually edit the parameters.

There was also an interesting site called bootdisk.com where you can find self extracting images of install disks and bootdisks for various OSs. Could be useful if you don't want to go through the hassle of making bootdisks. (back to the config.sys and autoexec.bat editing days)

Anyway, I'm just so glad I got all data back 100% intact. I must be personally blessed by God himself or something. lol

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: kensuguro on 2003-04-10 15:59 ]</font>

Herr Voigt · Post by **Herr Voigt** » Thu Apr 10, 2003 4:39 pm

Now it's time for you to have a big good whisky.

Post by **hubird** » Thu Apr 10, 2003 7:51 pm

kensuguro · Post by **kensuguro** » Fri Apr 11, 2003 12:17 pm

I'm having popcorns and beer!

Post by **hubird** » Fri Apr 11, 2003 5:48 pm

jupiter8 · Post by **jupiter8** » Sat Apr 12, 2003 3:41 pm

and a fatty for willy

kensuguro · Post by **kensuguro** » Sun Apr 13, 2003 11:30 pm

LOL. that was a cool article.

braincell · Post by **braincell** » Mon Apr 14, 2003 4:11 am

Hardware failure is so rare. At least it was a learning experience.

spacef · Post by **spacef** » Wed Apr 16, 2003 1:15 am

have you tried repairing your IDE controllers ? (i guess the disk is ide).
That did the trick on some of my old so-beleived as crashed....