Hard Drive Crash

[Guest]

Dear Sir

I suffered a hard drive crash yesterday. Fortunately, it was my second physical drive (or slave drive). It crash for some reason. I recently converted it to NTFS. My PC is a Pentium 1.5 Ghz with 384 Mb of RAM. The Mainboard is a Soltek SL-85SD model. I have two physical drives : the primary drive is a Seagate 40 Gb drive and the problem slave drive is a Seagate 20 Gb ATA 66. I am running windows XP Professional on the said computer. WIndows XP is still running but at the present time, cannot "see" the second drive when I click on My Computer.

I was installing a new device driver for my video card (NVIDIA TNT2 M64) when it crashed. Unfortunately, I made a mistake of restoring to an earlier restore point. This restore point includes the fact that my second physical drive is formatted under FAT32 !

Now I am having a problem. I used Filerecovery to see if the files still exusts and it SEEMS like they still do. What I would like to do ask the experts here is this

(1) How can I get my PC to recognize the second drive in Windows XP without doing anything to the drive itself so that I can restore the NTFS file system. It seems to me that the File structure in the second physical drive was corrupted which is why I am prevented from gaining access to the files on the drive from Windows XP or even under the DOS environment

(2) If this can't be done, how can I recover my files. In FIle Recovery Professional, It sees two file systems in the drive: the FAT32 and the NTFS FIle System. I suppose a copy of the NTFS is lying around somewhere in that second drive. Is it possible to pick up a copy of the MBR and Partition Record and "copy" it to the Boot Sector ?

I need help. Thanks

Antonio Sy

 

[Guest]

XP can run on FAT32 w/o a problem,even having ntfs files on it,the file
can get corrupted but the drive should be ok.You can install xp cd,exit the info
page,restart computer,boot to xp cd,recovery,press enter for password,at cm
screen 1st type:CHKDSK D: (read only),then type:CHKDSK D: /R When its thru
type:EXIT Youre files should be recoverable,switching to ntfs from FAT32 i
a one-way process,only reformatting the hd can switch it back,restore cant.

 

[D.Currie]

Dear Sir:

I suffered a hard drive crash yesterday. Fortunately, it was my second

physical drive (or slave drive). It crash for some reason. I recently
converted it to NTFS. My PC is a Pentium 1.5 Ghz with 384 Mb of RAM. The
Mainboard is a Soltek SL-85SD model. I have two physical drives : the
primary drive is a Seagate 40 Gb drive and the problem slave drive is a
Seagate 20 Gb ATA 66. I am running windows XP Professional on the said
computer. WIndows XP is still running but at the present time, cannot "see"
the second drive when I click on My Computer.

I was installing a new device driver for my video card (NVIDIA TNT2 M64)

when it crashed. Unfortunately, I made a mistake of restoring to an earlier
restore point. This restore point includes the fact that my second physical
drive is formatted under FAT32 !

Now I am having a problem. I used Filerecovery to see if the files still

exusts and it SEEMS like they still do. What I would like to do ask the
experts here is this :

(1) How can I get my PC to recognize the second drive in Windows XP

without doing anything to the drive itself so that I can restore the NTFS
file system. It seems to me that the File structure in the second physical
drive was corrupted which is why I am prevented from gaining access to the
files on the drive from Windows XP or even under the DOS environment.

(2) If this can't be done, how can I recover my files. In FIle Recovery

Professional, It sees two file systems in the drive: the FAT32 and the
NTFS FIle System. I suppose a copy of the NTFS is lying around somewhere in
that second drive. Is it possible to pick up a copy of the MBR and
Partition Record and "copy" it to the Boot Sector ?

I need help. Thanks.

Antonio Sy

Going back to a previous restore point would not change the partitioning
from NTFS to fat32. As a matter of fact, there aren't any tools within
Windows XP that could change a drive from NTFS to fat32.

However, the "why" of the hard drive problem isn't as important as how to
get things working again. If your file recovery software can see the files,
use it to recover what you need, then you can play around with the drive.