Issue with external hdd in IcyBox lost MBR maybe

  • Thread starter Thread starter Claire
  • Start date Start date
C

Claire

Windows XP pro SP2 with all updates.
At work I run a hard disk drive housed in an external Icy Box firewire/usb
device using firewire. It's partitioned into drives Y and Z, ntfs, and is
for storing music and other data files. Not a boot drive.
Ive had problems losing connection from XP pro whenever I try to store large
volumes of files in a single batch. I usually have to reset the Icybox and
re-scan from disk management to get the drive recognized. It's been a bit of
a nuisance.

Anyway, today I was performing a CD copy (with nero) onto my C:\temp
directory. I store my cd collection on the icybox, so the only disk activity
on the Z drive should have been what media player was reading.
As nero was writing the image, I started getting errors from WMP saying that
it couldn't read files on the Z drive and I needed to run a chkdsk
When I tried that I was told to unmount the drive and reboot. (I don't
believe this is a virus problem)

After that, I now seem to have 2 partitions with no/RAW file system
installed. The empty Y drive reformatted with no problems. I don't want to
reformat my Z drive as that's got all my data on it.
How can I rebuild my master boot record in XP pro? cmd window won't let me
change to the z drive, disk management doesn't let me do anything useful. I
don't have a floppy disk drive, only room for either cd player OR this disk
drive (not both) in my shuttle pc case

thanks
Claire
 
The disk drive had been compressed, so all was wrapped in a single file.
File had been corrupted, so Ive lost everything. ( I tried partition magic,
Wininternals and 2 other professional products to repair the problem) Days
of ripping cd collection again on the horizon.
2 lessons,
1) don't trust external disk drives that aren't dedicated for the job
2) don't trust compressed volumes.
Maybe i should have taken the drive to the police suspecting it had belonged
to Michael Jackson, they'd probably been able to restore the data ;o/
 
Exactly the same issue happened to me, although no compression ha
been applied. All partition suddenly appeared as RAW, no file system
I actually used a tool called GetDataBack for NTFS fro
www.runtime.org.

GetDataBack for NTFS scans and recovers all the lost files - so a
least I didn't have to re-rip everything. However this has happene
twice in the space of a week now, so would rather like to fix th
problem and not stop recovering from the results
 
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