Thread: Help! Partition died

ARRG! Pls recommend a recovery utility.

My desktop XP machine died during a windows update and will not boot. It had 2 partitions.

On my laptop (running vista) I can see the bad drive (now installed in an external enclosure) but it only recognizes the first partition.

How can I recover the second partition?

Thanks mags!

How is your enclosure hooked up to your laptop, USB? Did you have to install drivers that came with the enclosure?

I assume both partitions were mounted with drive letters on your laptop? So you had something like c:, d: (cd-rom), then e: and f: on your external drive?

Originally Posted by milton

How is your enclosure hooked up to your laptop, USB? Did you have to install drivers that came with the enclosure?

I assume both partitions were mounted with drive letters on your laptop? So you had something like c:, d: (cd-rom), then e: and f: on your external drive?

The enclosure has firewire and USB interfaces. I'm using USB.
All drivers are installed.
When the failing drive is connected, I see the drive letter "g:" which corresponds to the drive's smaller partition which previously was "c:" on the old machine. Nothing corresponding to the old "d:" is visible.

So... you see the boot partition but you can't boot from it?

Originally Posted by wi3dzmin

So... you see the boot partition but you can't boot from it?

Yes. So I removed it from the XP desktop machine, got the enclosure and started trying to recover the data via my laptop (running vista). So, now I am not trying to boot from it anymore.
I could still return it to the desktop machine, though I don't know how much further I can get with that.

I'm not that familiar with vista, but it's possible the partition just lost it's drive letter assignment. Go into control panel and look for something call Computer Management, when you open this you should see Disk Management. In XP you can right-click Disk Management and select "Rescan Disks". Or if you see the 2nd partition in there (probably on Disk1), right click it and look for some like assign drive letter.

It's likely that windows messed up the boot partition. If you've got an XP cd boot from it into the windows recovery console, chkdsk/fixboot/fixmbr are your friends.

RTFM here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058

If you are seeing the first partition and can read the data then there could be a few possible issues- the first is the second partition is still out there but deleted some how. Or the second partition is not being seen due to the hard drive having bad sectors and is starting to fail completely. If it is the drive is failing completely, then the manufacturer's disk drive utility will fail (SeaTools from Seagate, Western Digital has Data Lifeguard, and Hitachi has Drive Fitness tool.) Start with one of them if it is one of those brand drives, they are downloads from the manufacturer's web sites.

Be warned also- If the drive is clicking and erroring out then you may end up doing more damage to the data trying to continue to run the drive too.

Otherwise if the 2nd partition got deleted and is in fact not because of the failing drive (but I have not seem many Windows updates go wrong and cause data loss of the 2nd data partition (unless the drive was set up for dual boot with 2 OS's loaded.) There are some recovery tools out there - a few free downloads (not sure if all are working on Vista or not) and some require purchase. If you want to try on your own- I'd recommend GetDataBack (for NTFS or Fat they have 2 different versions) as a paid purchased one- download the trial and attempt to recover and then if you have success pay the money for the software code ($50 or so- PM me if you want to know more.)

If you can't afford the paid package then there is one called PC File Inspector (German site) that has a downloadable free version of some recovery tools. Not as easy to use this software as the paid but it does a scan too and can work in some cases just as well as the paid versions.

Originally Posted by wi3dzmin

It's likely that windows messed up the boot partition. If you've got an XP cd boot from it into the windows recovery console, chkdsk/fixboot/fixmbr are your friends.

RTFM here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058

I tried those options before posting the thread.

Originally Posted by RShea

Be warned also- If the drive is clicking and erroring out then you may end up doing more damage to the data trying to continue to run the drive too.

Looks like it's going to hell quickly.

freezer time!

Originally Posted by wi3dzmin

freezer time!

rofl, throw that at a comp engr and ask em why it works.

you might also try running a liveCD distribution of linux like Knoppix. you might even try it with the disk in the machine (vs the enclosure). this has worked for me more than once on disks that arn't totally fubar. mostly on machines that are beyond recovery and I am grabbing important data and nuking the rest. the learning curve can be kinda steep but you seem computer savy enough for it.

just remember that Knoppix's ntfs write capabilities are somewhat limited. use an external harddrive to backup recovered stuff and to avoid this limitation. you won't have to tangle with linux filesystems this way either. this all functioning on the impression that most external harddrives use fat32 (any mags know if I am just to impressionable?).

there are more suitable tools for this kind of recovery if you really need the data involved. even if the platters have undergone some damage you have options. professional recovery is available in most larger cities (even in WY )
it all comes down to what the data is worth to you.

There's a decent & free recovery program called scroungentfs probably available on freshmeat, or just google it. I've had varied success using this. You may be able to just mount it anyway so try that before hand as many times windows has problems seeing a parition that linux will simply ignore and recovery is possible.

http://www.runtime.org/

GetDataBack works.
I've recovered data from 2 HD's with the click of death.

there are several utilities available on download.com. I tried the demo version of each, then used the cheapest one to recover the data. Hope something works out for you, it's a sucky situation to find yourself in.

Originally Posted by oZzmith

just remember that Knoppix's ntfs write capabilities are somewhat limited.

write support is not really limited. see here

I was trying to use Knoppix to do this same sort of data recovery for a friend earlier this week. The laptop was giving the BSOD. I couldn't get knoppix to mount the partition because it was marked as bad, it kept telling me that I needed to run chkdsk /f on the disk before I could mount it. Running chkdsk failed with hardware errors. Data couldn't be recovered.

Bklyn, Knoppix might be worth a shot if you can't get anything else to work.