Maggy said:
Hello Paul, Let me explain further in more detail. (and thanks for the
reply)
I bought this new off the shelf computer, a HP. That was my first
mistake, Why? because they don't come with driver/chipset disks! (no
disks at all) Having said that I must say that HP help and Support by
phone is first class.
It came bundled with pre-installed software mainly trial stuff I didn't
really want.
My biggest problem is that it also came with Vista Premium installed. I
tried to give Vista a chance but in the end I just got sick and tired of
all the permissions. Can't do this, can't do that, permission required,
you don't have permision etc,etc...
So, I tried reinstalling my XP os, Second mistake! No Chipset.
This is when I deleted C: & D: partitions. I deleted the D: partion
thinking it was the HP restore patition.
Anyway I then let the XP disk format C: drive but I don't think it
formatted D:, and install XP only to find I was
in trouble not having any chipset disks.
Not having the XP chipset and no way of getting it I finally deciided
just to reinstall Vista from a backup I made earlier (3 cd's).
So that takes me to where am now.
My Vista system is reinstalled and working fine (still have to put up
with Permission thing) but no second physical hard drive.
Second physical harddrive showing up UNALLOCATED.
I have many photo shoots on my unallocated drive, anthing I can do?
TIA
I still am not certain we are talking about two separate disks. It
sounds like an HP computer with one hard drive, which had
three partitions on it at one time, C, D, and a hidden recovery
partition. (It isn't hidden, it just uses a partition type that
doesn't show up on a Windows desktop.)
Now, if you deleted C and D (I can see deleting D, by turning
it into unallocated space, but deleting C while you're booted
from it, sounds a bit more difficult).
It is important to understand exactly what you've done, because
it affects the disk layout.
If you just deleted D, then the space D took is still there.
You'd have C, <unallocated>, hidden_partition. If you managed
to actually delete C and D, and then had an OS installer
prepare the disk, it could make the new C take up all the
space that the old C and D were using. And that would be
more difficult to fix.
I suspect you have C, <unallocated>, hidden_partition right
now. If the new C is the same size as the old C, that would be
good news. That then leaves the question, of what exactly
does <unallocated> mean.
It could mean, that the entry in the partition table is all
that gets touched. It would be a matter of putting the entry
back in the partition table.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Data_Recovery_Examples
You would need to pick an environment to work in. For example,
if you loaded TestDisk onto a DOS boot floppy, then there would
be no OS running to interfere with the repair effort. Alternately,
a Linux LiveCD could be used, and run TestDisk from that environment.
I have Knoppix and Ubuntu here, and use them for little experiments.
Another advantage of a Linux LiveCD setup, is I could probably manage
to make a sector by sector backup of the disk, before working on it.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
To back up a disk in Linux, I'd use the "dd" disk dump command.
The syntax would be something like this. While in Linux, you
need to figure out the names of the devices, and that is the
hardest part of doing this step right.
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb
The brand new disk you purchase (hdb), should be exactly the
same size as the old one, or slightly bigger. The only thing it
cannot be, is smaller, as then some stuff on the end of hda would
not get copied. That would not be a problem if you knew the end
of the disk was empty, but I'd prefer to not take a chance.
Just to prove how many disks are present in the machine, you
should be able to look in Disk Management and see there,
how many rows the partitions take. For example, on my current
machine which has one hard drive, there are four primary partitions.
This is what I see
Disk 0 C: DATA D: KSTORE K:
Basic FAT32 FAT32
74GB 19GB 19GB 18GB 18GB
Healthy Healthy Healthy Healthy
(System)
So my physical single disk "Disk 0", has four partitions. C: is
the boot drive, still FAT32 (never bothered to convert it). D:
is the DATA partition. The third partition is for Linux Swap,
and Windows doesn't know what it is. There is no file system
as such. The fourth partition is also foreign, and is EXT2
storage for Linux. The partition label shows up, "KSTORE",
the size is known, but again, Windows disavows knowledge of
foreign file systems.
I suspect when you go into disk management, you're going to
see something similar. Only your middle section of the
row, is going to have the "unallocated" part. I suspect
TestDisk can put it back for free, or you can spend money
on the many programs I could find when I looked for
"restore deleted partition" with a search engine.
By the way, I'm an amateur at this, and all I can outline
is the approach I'd use if this was my disk.
1) Don't be in a hurry. Gather as many suggestions as you
can first.
2) I personally prefer to back up the damaged media first.
This is based on a trivial experience I got years ago at
work. I had a damaged disk. The group I was in designed
both computer hardware and software (we designed our own
OS), and we had a recovery program written by staff
available. I used it, and it was supposed to copy the
duplicate disk structure, to repair the bad structure.
Instead, what it did, is copy the bad structure over top
of the good structure, forever erasing the information
on the disk. (It would have taken too long to find all
the data by hand, so I gave up on it.) I learned from
this, don't trust any utility that does "in-place" repairs.
That would include TestDisk, as it is an "in-place" repair
utility. TestDisk does not use a second disk, to scavenge
data.
3) Once the backup copy is made, then I could afford to
experiment with TestDisk.
There are also other USENET groups, some of which specialize
in storage and hard drives. You could also post your question
there if you want. Or even in a WinXP or Vista group for that matter.
Judging by the information here, the capabilities of Vista
allow lots of damage to be done. Resizing partitions would
make quite a mess to clean up, if you wanted to put stuff
back later. If you've done something like that, well, that
would be out of my league.
http://www.vista4beginners.com/How-...using-only-Windows-Vista-Disk-Management-tool
HTH,
Paul
