Help Reading Bad Partition Table

  • Thread starter Thread starter Dominic.Bologna
  • Start date Start date
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Dominic.Bologna

I had a 80GB Maxtor IDE HDD that suddenly died. It was running as my
3rd (E:) drive on my Win XP PC. PC was running ok, then on a reboot, it
took about an hour to load WinXP. When WinXP started, the drive volume
was gone and disk letter was there but unavailable to read. Disk
manager said there was no NTFS partition, it was reported as RAW type.


I used Winternal's Disk Commander and when I tried to scan the volume,
it said can not read sector 0, 1, 2, etc. I ignored the errors to
complete the scan. When scan was finished Disk Commander said it could
not read the partition table.

Is there any way to get the data off the disk?
 
2 more notes:
Maxtor PowerMax Tools passes a quick scan and says partition table is
present. A full scan says the drive is failing and gives a diagnostics
code (de98da75).

My Windows System Event Viewer says "The device, \Device\Harddisk2\D,
is not ready for access yet." Event ID 15 when the drive is installed.

There is (was) only one partition on the disk.
 
I had a 80GB Maxtor IDE HDD that suddenly died. It was running as my
3rd (E:) drive on my Win XP PC. PC was running ok, then on a reboot, it
took about an hour to load WinXP. When WinXP started, the drive volume
was gone and disk letter was there but unavailable to read. Disk
manager said there was no NTFS partition, it was reported as RAW type.


I used Winternal's Disk Commander and when I tried to scan the volume,
it said can not read sector 0, 1, 2, etc. I ignored the errors to
complete the scan. When scan was finished Disk Commander said it could
not read the partition table.

Is there any way to get the data off the disk?
Click to expand...

This makes sense as the partition table is in sector 0, so it is
totally gone. Based on info you supplied, your disk likely has no
reserved blocks that it can use to remap data.

You could write a program or a unix script to copy all good sectors to
another disk, but your filesystem is munged so you would have to
likely reconstruct things manually.

There are programs out there for doing it, but they aren't free. My
suggestion, be prepared o spend a lot of money with data recovery
firm. There is no magic command or setting you can onnfigure to get
the damaged blocks back.
 
I found this page talking about freezing HDDs to recover data
Click to expand...
http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2006/01/freeze-your-hard-drive-to-recover-data.html

Just want to point out that the drive being put in the freezer was a Maxtor.
Just another confirmation of their inferiority and bad reputation.
I guess I'll give that a try.
Click to expand...


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I booted up linux and recieved an "Input/output error" after the drive
was mounted. I tried the ddrescue tool
(http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html) Some of the data
was recovered, but the file table seems to be gone.

I put the drive in the freezer now.

Didn't Maxtor used to be good? I just read they're laying off 900
people and being bought by Seagate. I guess that's a sign that they're
no good anymore. I still refuse to buy IBM/Hitachi after I got screwed
with a few of the DeathStars.

Who do you recommend for good drives?
 
I suggest you use data recovery software such as EASEUS
DataRecoveryWizard to recover files.

Download demo version: http://www.easeus.com/download.htm

You can use "AdvancedRecovery" to scan your corrupted partition. After
the scan is complete, the lost file will be displayed in
DataRecoveryWizard, you can select them and recover them.
 
I was able to recover 99% of the file. I used a programed called HDD
Regenerator (http://www.dposoft.net), it found around 2000 bad sectors
and recovered them into usable sectors, nothing showed up on the disk
under DOS. Windows XP then did the rest of the repair, when I put it
in and booted it up, it rebuilt the file table. As far as I can see
only 2 out of 2-3k files were lost.
 
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