[karajorma]

I just did a reinstall of windows on my main PC. Unfortunately when I reinstalled something went wrong and the partitions on a completely different drive have vanished on me.

The drive seems to be fine and the files are still there when I inspect the drives with a file recovery program (on one of the partitions at least). Only problem is that I don't have 200GB free to copy everything to so that I can simply repartition the drive which basically means that I need to recover the partitions. Only problem is that I don't have a floppy drive on this PC so most of my basic file recovery options are out.

Anyway I figured I'd get some ideas on how to proceed before I do anything with the drive.

[Fury]

What filesystem is used on these partitions?

[karajorma]

NTFS.

I should mention that I tried partition magic and it gave me an error about my EZ-Drive being corrupt and that I should use the floppy to repair it the first time I tried it and then logged me off and shut down the PC the second

[Kamikaze]

I just did a reinstall of windows on my main PC. Unfortunately when I reinstalled something went wrong and the partitions on a completely different drive have vanished on me.

Are you sure the partitions are gone or is Windows just failing to detect them? I used to have some issues with Windows 2000 where if I upgraded to SP2 most of my drives would go missing in Windows.

In any case, you could try using a Linux rescue disk. You'll probably want to find one that has Partimage, TestDisk, or a similar tool.

[karajorma]

Would a linux disk be able to rescue NTFS partitions though?

I was running SP2 prior to the reinstall. In fact the only difference is that I went from XP Home to XP Pro. Disk Management reports the entire drive as Unallocated.

[Cyker]

Could you buy/borrow/stea-borrow a hard disk to dump things to?

If you were using FAT32 there are a few tools to use, but with NTFS you're basically ****ed - It's incredibly difficult to recover NTFS drives if the basic tools like 'chkdsk' don't work. The fact that there are almost NO diagnostic programs for NTFS that actually do anything beyond what chkdsk does this.

Linux might be able to read the files so you could compy them some place, but NTFS writing support is basically at alpha stage for Linux, and I wouldn't trust it to read a damaged partition, nevermind write or repair it!


Now, that said, it sounds like the partition table has been munged - You could try booting into the Windows Recovery Console (Need to use the XP CD if you didn't install it originally with "Run->[XPCD]:\i386\winnt32 /cmdcons") and recovering the boot partitions/mbr, or just running the emergency recovery stuff off the WinXP CD.


However, being Micrisoft, it might just make things worse , which is why I'd highly recommend getting a spare drive first!

[Kamikaze]

Would a linux disk be able to rescue NTFS partitions though?

From the PartImage site:

The NTFS (Windows NT File System) is currently not fully supported: this means you will be able to save an NTFS partition if system files are not very fragmented, and if system files are not compressed.

Note that the status of the Linux NTFS driver has nothing to do with these programs. The other program I linked to (TestDisk) runs on non-Linux platforms and supports NTFS.

[Cyker]

PartImage is basically a buggier but non-evil Norton Ghost, not much use here I suspect unless he gets that 2nd HD.

TestDisk sounds pretty cool 'tho. If it *is* just the partition tables/MBR being buggered, and the MS recovery tools don't do anything useful, then it's worth a shot. If the NTFS partition itself is damaged 'tho, it won't be able to do anything.
As far as I can tell, the reason TestDisk can claim to support all those partition types is because it doesn't actually read them - It just checks the partition-type identifiers and rebuilds the partition table based on that, in the same way that "cfdisk" can 'support' all the partition types it does.

Since you can read files in the NTFS partition 'tho, it does sound more like partition problems.
It might also just be XP - It loves to wreck hard disk assignments to such a point that it can't boot itself
This is quite common for people doing 'upgrade' installations instead of from-scratch installations.

[karajorma]

TestImage solved the problem in about one minute

Thanks a lot people. I knew command console could probably fix my problems but I don't like the hit or miss way that the tools work. You run fixMBR or chckdsk and hope and pray that it fixes the problem. Testimage let me see what it had found and allowed me to choose whether I wanted to write my changes to the disk.

Definitely bookmarking this one