Lost Partition with XP

  • Thread starter Thread starter RW Felsch
  • Start date Start date
R

RW Felsch

Running WinXP (SP1) with 3 HDD - 50GB primary, 80GB secondary, 20GB
tertiary - all has been OK but today the PC froze and when rebooted the
partition on the tertiary drive (which held my backups!!!!) was reported as
RAW - can't seem to recover anything and can't find any articles at
Microsoft - anyhelp/suggestion appreciated.

Ron
 
Hey Ron,

I take it this wan't originally RAW but contained a file system.
Was it FAT or NTFS before this happened?
Was it a basic or dynamic disk ?
Where are seeing RAW, is it in diskmgmt.msc?

If you go into device manger, and go into disk properties/Volumes Tab
what info do you get, for

Type :
Status :
Partition Style : (This one will be interesting)
Capacity :
Unallocated Space :
Reserved Space :

And is there any volume info still present.

Paul
 
I have seen this on a few clients computers. There are two ways to handle
the problem, neither being simple.

1. You can use a disk editor program to modify the offending hard drives
partition tables. (you can, but I can't).

2. Get a file recovery program and a clean/formatted hard drive of equal, or
greater size. Use the recovery program to copy the files to the new hard
drive. Then, partition/format the original hard drive and copy the
folders/files back.

Good luck!
 
Running WinXP (SP1) with 3 HDD - 50GB primary, 80GB secondary, 20GB
tertiary - all has been OK but today the PC froze and when rebooted the
partition on the tertiary drive (which held my backups!!!!) was reported as
RAW - can't seem to recover anything and can't find any articles at
Microsoft - anyhelp/suggestion appreciated.
Click to expand...
Which is why I never put backups on hard disks. Offline backups is
better.
What happens if get a virus and overwrites the backup?
What happens if the HD fails?
What happens if you mess up partitioning/formatting?
The backups will disappear, thats what.
Backup to Tape or CD or DVD

Peter Hutchison
Windows FAQ
http://www.pcguru.plus.com/
 
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