NTFS Data Recovery

  • Thread starter Thread starter Justin Fields
  • Start date Start date
J

Justin Fields

I'm looking for some help in recoving data from a pair or
drives. They were data-only drives on a Win2k server
machine. Some hardware glitches came up, and the drives
got transferred into a new machine, with a new install of
Win2k on a different hard drive.

The two drives were then put into the new machine. The OS
was not installed on either of them. They were a mirror
in the old system. I think I had a brain cramp and I
wrote new signatures to the drives instead of importing
them as foriegn media. However, I did not format the
drives in the new system.

From this point, is there any way to recover the data? I
don't care about re-establishing the mirror right now. I
just want the data safely off of this machine and stored
somewhere else while I get the hardware issues settled.
The data drives are NTFS, without EFS, and the documents
are all normal Word files and such.

Thanks!
 
Justin Fields said:
I'm looking for some help in recoving data from a pair or
drives. They were data-only drives on a Win2k server
machine. Some hardware glitches came up, and the drives
got transferred into a new machine, with a new install of
Win2k on a different hard drive.
.....
Click to expand...

Try adding the drive(s) to a Win98 machine and then use an
NTFS DOS driver -- www.sysinternals.com and www.ntfs.com
each have freebie read-only versions that you can use to
copy stuff off NTFS drives. I was able to load the Sysinternals
ntfsdos driver high, freeing up enough memory to run Win98,
and I ended up with a drive letter assigned to the NTFS
drive I was recovering data from, and that worked really
well. Sysinternals also has a Win98 specific driver, but
that requires additional Win2K/XP files and it ended up being
unusably slow. Ntfs.com has a neat little download that will
create a fully functional boot floppy disk containing their
driver -- very good for a quick proof-of-concept test.

Hope this helps.

-BC
 
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