K
KC
And no, it's *not* because I booted into Windows 98.
The drive in question is a 200 gig WD hard drive, second physical
drive in system, with 3 partitions. After trying to format the 2nd
partition in Windows 2000 disk manager and having it say "format
failed" two times in a row, I decided to reboot and try again. On
reboot, the THIRD partition (containing all the data I now seek to
recover) has vanished, and the entire extended partition is now empty
and unallocated. So, I know the data is there, probably a corrupt
partition table?
The details...
The 200 gig is a brand new drive. It came with a Promise Ultra 100 TX2
ATA100 controller. I originally set it up with that, using a 5 gig
partition for the system and 2 equally sized partitions of about 90
gigs for storage. After running it awhile, I found that Winamp
playback would often cutout and ismietermined it was the Promise card
(and perhaps the fact that this is only a Pentium II 400 system with
256 megs ram). Decided I just wanted this drive for mass storage
anyway, I took out the promise card, put my old harddrive in to run
the system and set the 200 gigger as slave.
Problems begin: Several directories show up as ASCII gibberish. I
attribute it to the fact that I was using FAT32 for the 2 90 gig
partitions (I eventually wanted them to be accessible by Linux). I
move all data to partition 2, format partition 3 as NTFS, move all the
data onto that, then try to format partition 2. Then the error,
something along the lines of "unable to complete format" or whatever.
Then the reboot, then... no more partition 2 or 3. Also, the old
system files on partition 1 have all but vanished, all that remains is
a folder with .chk files (though I never ran scandisk on it). The
volume label is the same though.
Partition Magic indicated that the end of the last partition exceeded
the end of the physical disk, making me think that this problem may
have begun when switching from the Promise controller back to my
motherboard's IDE controller? Comments?
Reading newsgroup posts I came across some from Joep of
(www.DIYDataRecovery.NL). I ran his DiskPatch software and it
indicated that the original NTFS partition table and the backup are
identical.
At no point did I run any disk utilities and write any changes to
disk, so unless Windows 2000 has automatically made some severe
changes, I'm thinking things should be recoverable. I've dealt with
data recovery before, but never with NTFS. Any suggestions greatly
appreciated.
-Kent
The drive in question is a 200 gig WD hard drive, second physical
drive in system, with 3 partitions. After trying to format the 2nd
partition in Windows 2000 disk manager and having it say "format
failed" two times in a row, I decided to reboot and try again. On
reboot, the THIRD partition (containing all the data I now seek to
recover) has vanished, and the entire extended partition is now empty
and unallocated. So, I know the data is there, probably a corrupt
partition table?
The details...
The 200 gig is a brand new drive. It came with a Promise Ultra 100 TX2
ATA100 controller. I originally set it up with that, using a 5 gig
partition for the system and 2 equally sized partitions of about 90
gigs for storage. After running it awhile, I found that Winamp
playback would often cutout and ismietermined it was the Promise card
(and perhaps the fact that this is only a Pentium II 400 system with
256 megs ram). Decided I just wanted this drive for mass storage
anyway, I took out the promise card, put my old harddrive in to run
the system and set the 200 gigger as slave.
Problems begin: Several directories show up as ASCII gibberish. I
attribute it to the fact that I was using FAT32 for the 2 90 gig
partitions (I eventually wanted them to be accessible by Linux). I
move all data to partition 2, format partition 3 as NTFS, move all the
data onto that, then try to format partition 2. Then the error,
something along the lines of "unable to complete format" or whatever.
Then the reboot, then... no more partition 2 or 3. Also, the old
system files on partition 1 have all but vanished, all that remains is
a folder with .chk files (though I never ran scandisk on it). The
volume label is the same though.
Partition Magic indicated that the end of the last partition exceeded
the end of the physical disk, making me think that this problem may
have begun when switching from the Promise controller back to my
motherboard's IDE controller? Comments?
Reading newsgroup posts I came across some from Joep of
(www.DIYDataRecovery.NL). I ran his DiskPatch software and it
indicated that the original NTFS partition table and the backup are
identical.
At no point did I run any disk utilities and write any changes to
disk, so unless Windows 2000 has automatically made some severe
changes, I'm thinking things should be recoverable. I've dealt with
data recovery before, but never with NTFS. Any suggestions greatly
appreciated.
-Kent