Harddrive crash

[Shayne]

So my main media drive has lost is allocation table again.  This time it did it while rebooting (the previous time was during a defrag (which i hear isnt all that uncommon)).



Since the data is probably perfectly fine (nothing was writing to it, or from it during the crash), is there any software that users of RW have used for data recovery?

[Shayne]

Doing a little reading, it seems that its probably the partition table and not the MFT that was lost.  As when i double click on the drive it tells me that their is no partition found.

[Melbosa]

I know Cova has had to deal with a similar problem in the past, so he might be of some assistance.

[Shayne]

Well, ive check the computer managment console, and it shows that thier is a partition, but of an unknown type. Im running an app to detect a partition if there is one that was perhaps lost.

[Tonnica]

Well, ive check the computer managment console, and it shows that thier is a partition, but of an unknown type. Im running an app to detect a partition if there is one that was perhaps lost.

I've been looking around trying to find the name of the program I used when I wanted to recover my hard drive but it was essentially what you've already started using. I tracked down a program to detect existing (but potentially borked) NTFS file systems.



However as it had been so close to Frag and I had gotten no advice about my failing drive I panicked and tried formatting my drive to see if that restored stability. It didn't (the format only ever went through part-ways), and because of that the documents and project files I wanted to recover are unrecoverable outside of a very expensive trip to a data recovery shop. :cry:



The best I can do is wish you the best of luck in recovering your data. Having two HD's works great if you've got 'em so you can run a partition detection/file recovery from one drive on to the funky drive.

[Shayne]

Ive done pretty well so far, i think i will get near 100% recovery using a couple different apps im trying.  They all say that the data looks good (as it should).  I'll keep this thread updated.

[Cova]

I've lost the beginning of an NTFS partition before, and had to recover from it.  I was able to get 100% of my data back following the instructions in this MS article (which is pretty old now, applies to NT4 and W2K).



http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;153973



Anyways - grab low-lvl disk editor from windows resource kit, use article to locate where on the disk it keeps the backup copy of the NTFS boot sector, and copy that sector back to the proper place.

[Shayne]

Thanks for the link Cova.



Before reading that, i have discovered the route of my problem.  When i rebooted windows, windows forgot how to deal with drives bigger then 128GB, and changed my 200GB drive to a 128GB drive.



I believe that to be the root of my problem.  Im going to be moving that drive to my XP box, fixing the partition with partition manager, and seeing if i can recover the MFT.

[Mr. Analog]

Here's a couple of other popular tools that I know of:



VirtualLab

Disk Recovery



Directory Snoop

See what's hiding in your NTFS or FAT32 file system



NTFS4DOS

Boot a version of DOS that supports NTFS

[Lazybones]

Drive Rescue

Was freeware but the developer later went on to may a pay version.. I have used the Free on on NTFS but the support is not 100%.. Can be handy for finding deleted items.

[Shayne]

Turns out Windows 2000 Server upon installing MDAC, lost the ability to deal with large drives.



I added a registry key to give it back that ability.



Works like a charm.

[Tom]

I had great sucess with a tool called gpart.. Does a great job recovering partition tables. Will even scan the disk bit by bit for possible partition types and filesystem types.



Not that it would have helped here, but its still a very usefull tool. And you don't have to pirate it, or the OS to use it!

[Shayne]

I dont have morals when it comes to pirating software