Anyone know how to recover lost partitions?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Roges Hyspeed Internot Slurport
  • Start date Start date
R

Roges Hyspeed Internot Slurport

Bernie said:
I have all the most important data backed up. But I have a huge number of
downloads (utilities and lots of other stuff) that would take a long time
to replace. It is worth it to me to spend some hours and even some money
not to have to replace those things. So...

I had four partitions; XP, Vista, Linux and a Linux swap. The XP partition
is the important one.

So I can see there are sites promising partition recovery software for a
fee. I don't mind a smallish fee but I want to know what works and what
doesn't first.

So anyone out there good at data recovery?

More data: I have another drive in the machine with a lot of free space
but it is also my data drive. It is okay but doesn't have an O/S on it.

There isn't a working O/S on the main drive and it is the main drive that
I want to recover. So the ideal solution is something that can work from
a bootable CD.
Click to expand...
Have you tried "Barts PE" or any of the similar bootable roms ?
 
Bernie--


Check out the apps from Sysinternals and Wininternals (who now have gone
over to MSFT as of a couple weeks ago--the apps are tremendous quality but
not cheap).

www.sysinternals.com

CH
 
I have all the most important data backed up. But I have a huge number
of downloads (utilities and lots of other stuff) that would take a long
time to replace. It is worth it to me to spend some hours and even some
money not to have to replace those things. So...

I had four partitions; XP, Vista, Linux and a Linux swap. The XP
partition is the important one.

So I can see there are sites promising partition recovery software for a
fee. I don't mind a smallish fee but I want to know what works and what
doesn't first.

So anyone out there good at data recovery?

More data: I have another drive in the machine with a lot of free space
but it is also my data drive. It is okay but doesn't have an O/S on it.

There isn't a working O/S on the main drive and it is the main drive
that I want to recover. So the ideal solution is something that can
work from a bootable CD.
 
Have you considered mounting the drive in an external usb enclosure and just
attaching it to your other computer for purposes of copying files over?
 
Roges--

Maybe I'm misreading, but I thought this was more of a lost data recovery
than simply repairing XP. Bart's PE is excellent, but if simply repairing
XP would do the job, I'd do a repair install booting from the XP CD if
Bernie has one.

CH
 
One of the Linux distros, either Ubuntu or SUSE (CRS disease!) is bootable
from the DVD as a trial and may provide a way to view the data on the
computer drives, but not having ever tried it, I don't know if this actually
will work in practice.
 
Files? That would be nice.

Yes I could remove the drive and fire it up on another machine if need be.
 
You read it right Chad. And yes I do have an XP CD. Three of them in fact.

From the XP CD recovery console I can see the partitions but they are
"unformatted".
 
Bernie said:
I have all the most important data backed up. But I have a huge number
of downloads (utilities and lots of other stuff) that would take a
long time to replace. It is worth it to me to spend some hours and
even some money not to have to replace those things. So...

I had four partitions; XP, Vista, Linux and a Linux swap. The XP
partition is the important one.

So I can see there are sites promising partition recovery software
for a fee. I don't mind a smallish fee but I want to know what works
and what doesn't first.

So anyone out there good at data recovery?

More data: I have another drive in the machine with a lot of free
space but it is also my data drive. It is okay but doesn't have an
O/S on it.
There isn't a working O/S on the main drive and it is the main drive
that I want to recover. So the ideal solution is something that can
work from a bootable CD.
Click to expand...

I have used Active@Partition before with successful results. It was a long
time ago. I can't remember details other than I saved the link because the
program worked.

http://www.partition-recovery.com/
 
Bernie said:
I have all the most important data backed up. But I have a huge number
of downloads (utilities and lots of other stuff) that would take a long
time to replace. It is worth it to me to spend some hours and even some
money not to have to replace those things. So...

I had four partitions; XP, Vista, Linux and a Linux swap. The XP
partition is the important one.

So I can see there are sites promising partition recovery software for a
fee. I don't mind a smallish fee but I want to know what works and what
doesn't first.

So anyone out there good at data recovery?

More data: I have another drive in the machine with a lot of free space
but it is also my data drive. It is okay but doesn't have an O/S on it.

There isn't a working O/S on the main drive and it is the main drive
that I want to recover. So the ideal solution is something that can
work from a bootable CD.
Click to expand...

Bernie:

Following your posts today it seem that your problems really began after
you installed osl2000. Although it did not seem to boot the OS's
correctly (for some reason) I would think that it still knows where the
partitions are (or were).

I don't know about osl2000, but I think the way these boot managers work
is that they install themselves to a small partition, and then change
the IPL code in the MBR to transfer control to this partition, rather
than to the boot sector of the active primary partition (which is what
the "Standard IPL" code does). On first installation it also copies the
partition table in the MBR into its own internal partition table,
sometimes called the extended MBR (EMBR). Now when you reboot, the
machine boots to the boot manager (which is a kind of mini-OS). The boot
manager then displays a list of the bootable partitions in its EMBR,
from which you choose one.

When the boot manager boots (or tries to boot) to the selected OS, it
may hide the partitions of the other OS's. To do this, it rewrites the
MBR to include only the partition of that OS (which it makes the active
partition), and removes the others. However, its EMBR still knows where
all the partitions are.

When you want to install a new OS, the boot manager makes a new
partition for it, and makes it the active partition in the MBR (probably
hiding the other OS partitions). You then boot with the CD of the new
OS, and install to the created partition. The installation typically
rewrites the MBR IPL code to transfer control to the boot sector of the
new partition. So now the machine boots only to the new OS. To fix this,
you have to do a "repair install" of the boot manager, so that the IPL
code in the MBR again points to the boot manager partition, so the
machine will boot to the boot manager again.

What you did, I think, was run fixmbr from the XP disk, thereby losing
the boot manager. You probably should not have done this. But if you are
able to do a repair install of the boot manager (as after installing a
new OS), its EMBR should still have a record of where all the partitions
are. The important thing is to do this "repair install" rather than a
fresh installation, because the latter will copy the current MBR into
the EMBR. One you have done the repair install, the boot manager should
have some mechanism for putting all the EMBR information back into the
MBR, and your partitions will be restored.

I don't know if this will help you at all. My understanding of these
things has come from playing with the Ranish Partition Manager, and it
may not apply to osl2000. But I think these boot managers generally
operate in a similar manner.

HTH,

David Wilkinson
 
I hate to say this but I think your analysis is spot on.

The mistake was, as you pointed out, to use fixmbr without first having
uninstalled the boot manager in the usual way. Mistake is a mild word.

Having used this boot manager in the past I was confident in it's
abilities. It did indeed detect without any assistance all three O/Ses
and presented them in it's menu. The problem was that nothing happened
when attempting to boot from any one of them. At which point I was
disgusted.

It is now too far gone to recover with the boot manager but the
partitions, although not seen correctly, are still of the right size and
I'm confident the data is still there.

I'm looking at demo versions of two tools at the moment. active
partition recovery is one and the other is diskpatch.
 
Bernie wrote:
So anyone out there good at data recovery?
Click to expand...

Hey Bernie.

The BEST data recovery utility is, has always been, and probably always WILL
be SpinRite. If the drive is spinning up, you can retreive files. IMHO
anyways...but I do it for a living...
 
Bernie said:
I hate to say this but I think your analysis is spot on.

The mistake was, as you pointed out, to use fixmbr without first having
uninstalled the boot manager in the usual way. Mistake is a mild word.

Having used this boot manager in the past I was confident in it's
abilities. It did indeed detect without any assistance all three O/Ses
and presented them in it's menu. The problem was that nothing happened
when attempting to boot from any one of them. At which point I was
disgusted.

It is now too far gone to recover with the boot manager but the
partitions, although not seen correctly, are still of the right size and
I'm confident the data is still there.

I'm looking at demo versions of two tools at the moment. active
partition recovery is one and the other is diskpatch.
Click to expand...
Bernie:

I'm not sure I agree that things are necessarily "too far gone to
recover with the boot manager". If anybody removed these partitions from
the MBR partition table, it was almost certanly the boot manager
osl2000. And it probably still knows where they are, and what file
system type they are. And has the ability to put them back in the MBR.

Did you "uninstall" osl2000? I'm not quite sure what it means to
uninstall a boot manager (it's like an OS). Rather you boot in some
other way and remove or reformat the partition it lives on. If you did
not do this, then it is still there (somewhere) and it should be
possible to do a repair install of it.

Good luck!

David Wilkinson

===========
 
Bernie then why not try to repair by booting from the XP CD? If I
understand you correctly, you have to restore your XP and it's still there
but you can't see it.

1) I'd use the F8 options including the 3 safe modes (I'm omitting VGA for
this purpose) to try to system restore and I would use Last Known Good if
they don't work. I say 3 because sometimes one works when another will not.
If you use safe mode command, the command for system restore is:

%systemroot%\system32\restore\rstrui.exe

2) If you have the XP CD you can go to bios setup and put booting from CD in
#1 position and then try a repair install with the CD. That's a lot faster
and has a lot more success than using the Recovery Console and any of its
commands and yep, MSKBs sometimes mis-recommend the Recovery Console. The
corrupted registry KB is one of the most notable for this.

A repair install offers you the way to get your XP back intact after
watching a 35 minute banal Microsoft commercial in setup.

Repair Install
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/helpandsupport/learnmore/tips/doug92.mspx

The MSKB that is a model for my approach is this one:
Resources for troubleshooting startup problems in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;308041&Product=winxp

Good luck,

CH
 
I love the Linux repair solutions. I have friends who talk all the time
about theoretically using Linux to fix Windows XP (and possibly in the
future Vista) but I don't know how to do this and if you ever find detail on
these methods that work I hope you pass them on).

I wonder what the Vista setup guys like Darryl Gorter and Vinnie Flynt have
done using Linux to try to repair Windows. I don't mean to deploy from
MSFT--I just mean that works or not.

CH
 
This is where I got the idea from:

http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop

At the bottom of the page it says:

"Ready to try Ubuntu?

Just download the Ubuntu DesktopCD and test Ubuntu without changing anything
on your computer. If you want to keep Ubuntu permanently, there is an easy
installer right on the DesktopCD. Or you can order a few CDs for no cost
from shipit."

I take this to mean that this is a bootable operating system that makes no
permanent changes to the hard drive(s) and therefore, in theory, may be one
possible solution for data recovery.
 
Is it possible that the drives are "unmounted?"

Bernie said:
I think too far gone because all partitions are showing as unallocated
space in XP setup. They have the right sizes and are shown as seperate
entities but not as partitions.
Click to expand...
 
David said:
I'm not sure I agree that things are necessarily "too far gone to
recover with the boot manager". If anybody removed these partitions from
the MBR partition table, it was almost certanly the boot manager
osl2000. And it probably still knows where they are, and what file
system type they are. And has the ability to put them back in the MBR.

Did you "uninstall" osl2000? I'm not quite sure what it means to
uninstall a boot manager (it's like an OS). Rather you boot in some
other way and remove or reformat the partition it lives on. If you did
not do this, then it is still there (somewhere) and it should be
possible to do a repair install of it.
Click to expand...


I think too far gone because all partitions are showing as unallocated
space in XP setup. They have the right sizes and are shown as seperate
entities but not as partitions.
 
Back
Top