NTFS drive, Windows 2000 and "Write Signature"

  • Thread starter Thread starter Steve Cousins
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Steve Cousins

A researcher gave me a 320 GB SATA drive from a Windows XP machine that
he wants to have access to. I put it in a Windows 2000 machine and in
"Disk Management" it shows up as "Unknown". The only option appears to
be "Write Signature". Could doing this be a bad thing as far as being
able to access the data on the disk?

I have used "FinalData Enterprise" to see if there is data on the drive
and it finds two NTFS partitions with data. All looks fine. I can use
this to get the data now but it would obviously be better to have it
accessible the normal way. I just don't want to write the "Signature"
and then find that I can't even get the data via Final Data. I doubt if
this would happen but I'm not up on Windows so I'd like some advice.

As far as I can tell from what searching I've done, the Write Signature
command just deals with the MBR. It is also used to go to a Dynamic
Drive which I don't want to do. Would doing a fdisk /MBR be better?

Bottom line: what is the procedure I should use to safely mount these
partitions on this Win2K machine?

Thanks for your help.

Steve
 
Steve said:
Steve Cousins wrote:

Yes to all questions.
Click to expand...

I don't know the exact answer to your question but if the disk is shown
as "Unknown" it will be *extremely* risky to do anything with it with
the Disk Management tool! Witting a new signature to the disk may very
likely completely corrupt the disk. If you can recover the data with
recovery software you should use these recovery tools instead of trying
to do this with Windows Disk Management tools. If the data on the disk
is critical you should proceed carefully or consult professional data
recovery firms. Boot sector corruption is often at cause when an
otherwise known good disk suddenly becomes unknown. See here:

Recovering NTFS Boot Sector on NTFS Partitions
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/153973/EN-US/

How to Recover From a Corrupt NTFS Boot Sector
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/121517

These are extremely complex procedures that are usually best left to
data recovery professionals.

John
 
John said:
I don't know the exact answer to your question but if the disk is shown
as "Unknown" it will be *extremely* risky to do anything with it with
the Disk Management tool! Witting a new signature to the disk may very
likely completely corrupt the disk. If you can recover the data with
recovery software you should use these recovery tools instead of trying
to do this with Windows Disk Management tools. If the data on the disk
is critical you should proceed carefully or consult professional data
recovery firms. Boot sector corruption is often at cause when an
otherwise known good disk suddenly becomes unknown. See here:

Recovering NTFS Boot Sector on NTFS Partitions
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/153973/EN-US/

How to Recover From a Corrupt NTFS Boot Sector
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/121517

These are extremely complex procedures that are usually best left to
data recovery professionals.
Click to expand...


Thanks John. This is a data disk only so I'm not trying to boot from it.
I'm mainly just asking if the "Write Signature" procedure does anything
other than in the MBR. I don't want it to mess with any partition
tables or anything like that.

I'm guessing that the trouble is that it came from a Windows XP machine
and my Win2K machine doesn't recognize the signature or something.
Possibly (doubtful) it could be that the disk also came from a Chinese
version of Windows XP and my English version of Win2K doesn't speak
Chinese.

Anyway, if someone can tell me whether this "Write Signature" procedure
will do anyhing outside of the MBR I'd appreciate it.

Thanks,

Steve
 
Steve said:
Thanks John. This is a data disk only so I'm not trying to boot from it.
I'm mainly just asking if the "Write Signature" procedure does anything
other than in the MBR. I don't want it to mess with any partition
tables or anything like that.

I'm guessing that the trouble is that it came from a Windows XP machine
and my Win2K machine doesn't recognize the signature or something.
Possibly (doubtful) it could be that the disk also came from a Chinese
version of Windows XP and my English version of Win2K doesn't speak
Chinese.

Anyway, if someone can tell me whether this "Write Signature" procedure
will do anyhing outside of the MBR I'd appreciate it.

Thanks,

Steve
Click to expand...

You can always use disk tools like Microsoft's Diskprobe for one
http://www.dynawell.com/support/ResKit/winnt.asp#DiskTools or others
http://www.geocities.com/thestarman3/asm/mbr/BootToolsRefs.htm and save
the MBR and then restore it if things go bad. Under normal
circumstances rewriting the disk signature should not cause you to loose
the data on the disk, actually in some circumstances the old MS-DOS
fdisk /mbr is used to rewrite disk signatures. On a problem disk it's
anyones guess what will happen.

John
 
I'm guessing that the trouble is that it came from a Windows XP machine
and my Win2K machine doesn't recognize the signature or something.
Click to expand...

There is a difference in the version of NTFS. While operating system
version numbers change, the numbers for the underlying file system versions
may or may not change. However in the case of XP, it is different than
Win2000. I suspect this is the reason the Win2000 server can't read the
drive.

I don't think there's any way around this one except moving the data;
preparing the drive with the Win2000 server disk tools and then moving the
data back.
 
Sharon said:
There is a difference in the version of NTFS. While operating system
version numbers change, the numbers for the underlying file system versions
may or may not change. However in the case of XP, it is different than
Win2000. I suspect this is the reason the Win2000 server can't read the
drive.

I don't think there's any way around this one except moving the data;
preparing the drive with the Win2000 server disk tools and then moving the
data back.
Click to expand...

While the NTFS versions are different, I have *never* had any problems
reading healthy Windows XP disks mounted to Windows 2000. I believe
that the problem encountered by the OP is that the disk was corrupt and
he was asked to attempt to recover data from it.

John
 
While the NTFS versions are different, I have *never* had any problems
reading healthy Windows XP disks mounted to Windows 2000. I believe
that the problem encountered by the OP is that the disk was corrupt and
he was asked to attempt to recover data from it.
Click to expand...

Directly mounted or mounted over the network?

I replied early in the thread. Later when I read further into the thread it
was apparent that the two of you had a good handle on the situation and
didn't need me chiming in. I promise to read ahead next time :)
 
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