Anyone know how to recover lost partitions?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Roges Hyspeed Internot Slurport
  • Start date Start date
There are hundreds of Linux distros that are Live CD's which do not touch
the hard drive except for swap. Some are specialized cd's for repairing
systems. Those are better than any of the major distros like Ubuntu. See
DistroWatch.
 
Well, to borrow a phrase from Jonah, "It's all buggered up then, isn't it?"
Have you tried physically moving the drive to another computer running
Windows, going into Disk Management and mounting the drives, and then trying
to recover the data that way?
 
Not yet. I haven't had the time to really work on it yet and probably
won't till tomorrow night. I'm looking for the best options right now.
As that box has SATA drives and I don't have another SATA box here I
will stick a Win2k disk into it and see what it can do.

Somehow the partitions are still there but are only showing up as
unallocated space. Not as one lump of unallocated space but as 5 lumps
which corresponds to the number of partitions. The sizes also match. I
ran a partition recovery utility and it could see the folders and files
of the Vista installation but apparently not the XP installation.

Someone suggested trying an XP repair install and I will have a look at
that soon. At least as far as when it asks where you want to install it.
If the right partition comes up and can be used without being formatted
then it might work but seems a bit risky too.
 
Trying a repair install may or may not work; I'm confused by what's going on
precisely here Bernie. But I can guarantee you one thing; it cannot hurt
anything on any box you have. It's completely safe. You lose nothing.

Remeber the song line "Repair Install's another word for nothing left to
lose."

Janis Joplin

I put the directions in one of my posts.

CH
 
Raven said:
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...
Click to expand...

Can it recover partitions?
 
I remember that line from what 36 years ago? It didn't make sense to me
then but it sure does now. Lyrics like that were way ahead of their time.
 
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...

Bernie:

I think this is because these partitions are no longer in the MBR
partition table. According to Mark Vandenberg (a few days ago) this is
what happens in XP Disk Management (installed or setup disk) when a boot
manager has hidden a partition from the OS.

In the documentation for osl2000 there should be instructions for what
to do if the IPL code of the MBR has been overwritten by some other OS
(which you did by running fixmbr from the XP CD, but which more commonly
happens when you load a new OS).

Hang tough,

David Wilkinson
 
Theres lots of windows PE hibreds...
and other boot solutions
Hirems Boot cd for one
 
Colin Barnhorst said:
There are hundreds of Linux distros that are Live CD's which do not touch
the hard drive except for swap. Some are specialized cd's for repairing
systems. Those are better than any of the major distros like Ubuntu. See
DistroWatch.
Click to expand...

We generally use Knoppix for doing that stuff...It's not a "fixit" cd, but
works very well for booting and being able to work with the files without
messing with the filesystem...
 
Hey Bernie...when you installed osl, did you save the uninstall file to a
floppy like it tells you to? If not, REINSTALL the osl and go in and see if
you can UNhide and hidden partitions...If you did, simply use it to uninstal
and you should get your partition record back.

spinrite will only allow you to recover files that were lost on the
partition...not the partition records themselves.

Just for the record for folks...osl does not use a partition in any way. It
is simply a tiny utility that loads from the mbr of the boot drive, the same
as the vista mbr marks...

I just tried osl a few days ago and found it to be absolutely worthless for
the needs of us testing vista, as it has no ntldr file associated directly
with it...
 
Chad Harris said:
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
Click to expand...
<snip>
I used one of the bootable PE type cds to transfer data to another drive
internal and over network.
I had a similar problem with a test box that had prev had linspire on it, xp
recovery appeared to work but when it came to restart i still had the same
issue.

I may have used the "austrami" one cant remember but I know it saved me a
lot of work. it also had the utils i needed to reset passwords and repair
partitions etc.

There are a few good bootable roms out there many of which can get to ntfs
and linux partitions, most have a means of moving files around between
drives as well.

I have used different roms for different issues, they are worth getting hold
of and have saved me a lot of time (and money)
 
Roges Hyspeed Internot Slurport said:
<snip>
I used one of the bootable PE type cds to transfer data to another drive
internal and over network.
I had a similar problem with a test box that had prev had linspire on it,
xp recovery appeared to work but when it came to restart i still had the
same issue.

I may have used the "austrami" one cant remember but I know it saved me a
lot of work. it also had the utils i needed to reset passwords and repair
partitions etc.

There are a few good bootable roms out there many of which can get to ntfs
and linux partitions, most have a means of moving files around between
drives as well.

I have used different roms for different issues, they are worth getting
hold of and have saved me a lot of time (and money)
Click to expand...
 
Thanks Roges. I'm getting a few functions of some recovery methods and apps
like Spin Rite from this thread I hadn't seen before.

CH
 
David,

Wow... good post, dude.

Thanks,

Lang

David Wilkinson said:
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
Click to expand...
 
Roges said:
Have you tried "Barts PE" or any of the similar bootable roms ?
Click to expand...

I had a misconception of what Bart's PE was all about. I'm now looking
at it and it looks to be certainly worth a try.
 
Maybe I didn't understand the original question, but I thought it was:

There is data on the hard drive, and the partition that the data was in has
been deleted, or otherwise lost.

Even though the partition has been deleted, the data should still be on the
hard drive.

Can the partition be recreated so that the files can be accessed?

Is there some other way to access the files without recreating the
partition?

I believe he also asked about recovery services, which I think is probably
his best bet. If he starts repartitioning his hard drive, he could
overwrite his data.
 
And to be sure Winternals and Sysinternals which now belong to MSFT along
with their terrific personnel have those and I linked them a couple days
ago Todd.

CH
 
Todd said:
Maybe I didn't understand the original question, but I thought it was:

There is data on the hard drive, and the partition that the data was in
has
been deleted, or otherwise lost.

Even though the partition has been deleted, the data should still be on
the
hard drive.

Can the partition be recreated so that the files can be accessed?

Is there some other way to access the files without recreating the
partition?

I believe he also asked about recovery services, which I think is probably
his best bet. If he starts repartitioning his hard drive, he could
overwrite his data.
Click to expand...

Right...that's what I was trying to say before...

REpartitioning the drive will result in lost data.

If the partitions are lost, and osl2k is the culprit, then they are probably
just HIDDEN and need to be SHOWn

Under NO circumstances shoult the partition be WRITTEN to

Chances are, the partition table is not recoverable, but that is okay as
long as the DATA can be recovered, the partitions can be reconfigured AFTER
the data is safe...
 
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