Getting data from a drive with Go Back

  • Thread starter Thread starter Lil' Abner
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Lil' Abner

I have a 13 month old Gateway here (just out of warranty) with a toasted
motherboard. It has a 320Gb SATA hard drive. The guy wants me to retrieve
some of his important documents from it. So I installed it in one of my own
computers with Windows Pro SP2. BIOS recognizes it. Device Manager lists
it. Disk Management shows it as active, but no drive letter and the option
to assign it one is greyed out.

I thought about cloning it to an IDE drive and when I booted up with
Acronis True Image, it is listed as unsupported. It does show, though, a
small partiton with Go Back on it. And of course that's the culprit.

I've run into this before when trying to clone drives, but in those cases I
was still able to boot the original drive and remove GoBack. This time I
can't because the machine it came out of is non-functioning. Partition
Magic doesn't even see the GoBack partition.

Any suggestions as to how I might be able to read that drive and copy some
of the data off of it?
 
Lil' Abner said:
I have a 13 month old Gateway here (just out of warranty) with a toasted
motherboard. It has a 320Gb SATA hard drive. The guy wants me to retrieve
some of his important documents from it. So I installed it in one of my own
computers with Windows Pro SP2. BIOS recognizes it. Device Manager lists
it. Disk Management shows it as active, but no drive letter and the option
to assign it one is greyed out.

I thought about cloning it to an IDE drive and when I booted up with
Acronis True Image, it is listed as unsupported. It does show, though, a
small partiton with Go Back on it. And of course that's the culprit.

I've run into this before when trying to clone drives, but in those cases I
was still able to boot the original drive and remove GoBack. This time I
can't because the machine it came out of is non-functioning. Partition
Magic doesn't even see the GoBack partition.

Any suggestions as to how I might be able to read that drive and copy some
of the data off of it?
Click to expand...

No idea, but I found one reference here. The question is, when are you
supposed to "press space bar" ?

http://www.dennisjudd.com/2005/02/roxio_go_back_is_the_devil.html

Paul
 
Lil' Abner said:
I have a 13 month old Gateway here (just out of warranty) with a toasted
motherboard. It has a 320Gb SATA hard drive. The guy wants me to retrieve
some of his important documents from it. So I installed it in one of my own
computers with Windows Pro SP2. BIOS recognizes it. Device Manager lists
it. Disk Management shows it as active, but no drive letter and the option
to assign it one is greyed out.

I thought about cloning it to an IDE drive and when I booted up with
Acronis True Image, it is listed as unsupported. It does show, though, a
small partiton with Go Back on it. And of course that's the culprit.

I've run into this before when trying to clone drives, but in those cases I
was still able to boot the original drive and remove GoBack. This time I
can't because the machine it came out of is non-functioning. Partition
Magic doesn't even see the GoBack partition.
Click to expand...


I ran into that once and found that XP "sees" the drive as a Goback
partition and won't assign it a drive letter

*however* a win2k installation just "sees" it as NTFS and allows access to
the drive


Although it *might* be possible to edit the partition table and change the
label from a "goback" partition
to NTFS...it would probably be a lot safe to retrieve the data from a win2k
machine
 
Lil' Abner said:
I have a 13 month old Gateway here (just out of warranty) with a toasted
motherboard. It has a 320Gb SATA hard drive. The guy wants me to retrieve
some of his important documents from it. So I installed it in one of my own
computers with Windows Pro SP2. BIOS recognizes it. Device Manager lists
it. Disk Management shows it as active, but no drive letter and the option
to assign it one is greyed out.

I thought about cloning it to an IDE drive and when I booted up with
Acronis True Image, it is listed as unsupported. It does show, though, a
small partiton with Go Back on it. And of course that's the culprit.

I've run into this before when trying to clone drives, but in those cases I
was still able to boot the original drive and remove GoBack. This time I
can't because the machine it came out of is non-functioning. Partition
Magic doesn't even see the GoBack partition.

Any suggestions as to how I might be able to read that drive and copy some
of the data off of it?
Click to expand...

Perhaps there are unseen risks in this, but I have put a GoBack volume
into another machine and have allowed it to boot. Hit the spacebar when
the GoBack screen shows up, and you can uninstall it from there. Stop
it after it's done, and slave it to your "regular" boot drive.
 
philo said:
I ran into that once and found that XP "sees" the drive as a Goback
partition and won't assign it a drive letter

*however* a win2k installation just "sees" it as NTFS and allows access to
the drive

Although it *might* be possible to edit the partition table and change the
label from a "goback" partition
to NTFS...it would probably be a lot safe to retrieve the data from a win2k
machine
Click to expand...

I'd been suspecting the same in regard to XP and it might be easier to use a
Knoppix bootable CD for the recovery process as it will read NTFS natively. Just
have a FAT32 partition available to copy the data to as Knoppix can't write NTFS
unless extra steps are taken and support is installed.

Bob
 
I'd been suspecting the same in regard to XP and it might be easier to use a
Knoppix bootable CD for the recovery process as it will read NTFS natively. Just
have a FAT32 partition available to copy the data to as Knoppix can't write NTFS
unless extra steps are taken and support is installed.
Click to expand...

The suggestion to uninstall GoBack may be a good one though!
 
Perhaps there are unseen risks in this, but I have put a GoBack volume
into another machine and have allowed it to boot. Hit the spacebar
when the GoBack screen shows up, and you can uninstall it from there.
Stop it after it's done, and slave it to your "regular" boot drive.
Click to expand...

That's basically where I'm at with this one now. The guy went out and
brought a new computer as near to the same model as he could get and put
the old drive in it. He got as far as GoBack and then it wouldn't go any
further. So I told him to boot again and disable GoBack. Then I told him
to put the new drive (the one that came with the new computer) back in
and install the old one as a secondary and he should be able to read it.
Haven't heard back from him yet.

I appreciate all your guys' comments!
 
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