Partitions unknown or damaged, data recovering. Please help

[Bushidou2007]

Hi everyone. hope I'm posting in the right forum.

I have a big problem with my hard disk and I'm desperate that I think I lost my work and personal work data's.

My problem is that my partitions are unknown and can't install winXp without formating my C.

Please let me start with the begining. I have two HDD, one of them is of 160GB, this hardisk is split in 3 partitions:

C: (almost 9GB) contain WindowsXP

D: (130GB) contains all my work

E: (16GB) contains 16GB free

And the other hardisk:

H: (500GB)

Everything started when I installed Partition Magic 8.05 boot disk in C. After I instaled the software it poped up to restart windows.

Restarted windows and almost when I can hit F8 to enter in save mod (after the winxp loading logo) it poped up a white screen boot disk 16 colors picture and 3 options

boot WinXp

boot Win9x

boot WinXp

Clicked the first options, everything good entered in winXp, entered in My computer to find that D and E missing. All I could see was C and D (d beeing the 500gb hardisk).

Restarted computer, booted from XindowsXP cd and in that popup screen on what partition to install winxp seen that

C: 9G is ok D: 130 os2/ unknows E: unknown and H: ok

Here I formated the E drive that contained the 16gb free. restarted computer and after loading the ide drives etc the screen is now black with a _ flipering.

Can't enter in WinXp no more.

Restarted again and booted again from the winxp cd to find that the partitions now are C: 130 GB D: 22GB unpartition space H: unknown

Here I made the 22GB partition available to install the winxp again but with no luck, it said that it must put some files on the H partition, tried with C and same thing.

Turned off the computer and unpluged my 500 hardisk (H). Booted again to find out that now only C is visible C: 130GB (10 mb free)

Restarted booted again and entered in winxp repair mode by hiting the R key. Here I typed makepart or something like this

Lucky D 22GB was available as unpartition space and 130GB (10 mb free) was intact. Made available D by formating it and restarted. Booted again to try to install winXp again now that the big HDD H is out.

No luck when I try to install on D it says that it most format C, when I try on C it says that is to small press enter to continue to say that C is a partition unknown or dameaged.

Please help me.

[moongoon]

I'd take a spare hard drive or a hard drive you think is still intact and install a fresh copy of Windows.

Once you've got Windows up you can download and use PC Inspector File Recovery on those Partition Tragic'ed drives. PC Inspector File Recovery: http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm

The other option is to have a Win PE disc handy with a legal copy of GetDataBack integrated.. but, I would assume you're not lucky enough to have those things on hand. BartPE: http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ GetDataBack: http://www.runtime.org/

Edited August 27, 2007 by moongoon

[jaclaz]

Bushidou2007,

sorry to say so, but my guess is that your attempts to fix did make the situation much worse than it was.

Do you have a spare HD (or is the 500 Gb available?) to install XP to?

If you have not completely screwed up the system, your best option is to take your first disk out, attach it as slave and make a complete image of it.

Then, and only when you have a verified "dd-like" image of the entire disk, we can start talking of recovering data/partitions.

Working directly on the drive without a FULL image is equivalent to suicide, expecially for a newbie without experience and lacking some "tools and tricks of the trade".

DO NOT make any other modifications to that drive, you could make data unrecoverable.

jaclaz

[gosh]

Dont run fixmbr or fixboot on a pc with 3rd party partitioning software, that'll wipe it out from the mbr which will result in problems as you see...

-gosh

[Ponch]

If you have a floppy drive and a dos boot disk, you can try Testdisk for DOS. It does work. You just need to recover the 1st partition and make it active again (now it's the 2nd that's active and detected as unknown file format, that's why your computer won't boot). Do NOT format that 1st partition.

If your XP cd is without service pack (is it ?), you'll have trouble with your partitions that are over the 137Gb, I think that's why your 2nd and 3rd partitions were detected as unknown. Then you modified the 3rd one and made it active. That got you totally lost.

[Bushidou2007]

Thanks for all the help guys. Just installed windows on another hard drive and then connected the bad partition harddrive. In windows E and F appear as visible, display no data or GB name and of course I can't enter in none of them without poping that it must be formatted first.

Tried the first option from what moongoon said by installing the file recovery, selected the 3rd option [data recovering from unknown partitions] gone to Physical drive, selected the bad drive E and after about 1 hour of searching for logical (hit the bar at maximum) drives from E it found I think all the data. My problem with this software is that when I try to save a folder that has more then 1gb or so it crashes without no error and need to start all over again. Tried to times.

Any idea

Thanks for all your help again

P.S

Ponch just noticed you posted before me.

If your XP cd is without service pack (is it ?), you'll have trouble with your partitions that are over the 137Gb, I think that's why your 2nd and 3rd partitions were detected as unknown. Then you modified the 3rd one and made it active. That got you totally lost.

it is service pack 2

I don't have a floppy disk drive connected atm but I could connect one if it really must

@ jaclaz - The 500gb hardsisk partition is visible not unknown when only this hard is active, still I can't install windowsXP on it without formatting it first. It says something like it most put some files on this drive but is not a windows xp partition or something like it. Used another hardisk and now I have access to windows

Edited August 28, 2007 by Bushidou2007

[Ponch]

If you have the possibility to make a BartPe cd, the plugin for Testdisk is quite easy to make (it takes 3 files from the Testdisk for Win32).

[Bushidou2007]

Just tried getdataback for NTFS, all go smoothly but the only problem is that it could only see the C (windows etc) then tried with the FAt version and found only bad numbered folders like 0085. If I copy one of these and try to open the recovered files all of them are corrupted.

it says that is FAT16 the big partition witch I want to recover so dunno why it doesn't work

And the other one is not even NTFS or FAT something like DOS partition but is not important since I don't have no file on it

any idea?

Thanks

Edited August 29, 2007 by Bushidou2007

[jaclaz]

So, if I get it correctly, you now have booted a PC with windows (on a third hard-drive) and connected the one with corrupted data as slave/secondary.

Now you should make a sector by sector image of the drive with the corrupted data on another drive (if you have enough space on the "new" one you booted from, otherwise on a partition on the "500 Gb" one. (due to the size of the image the partition needs to be NTFS)

Depending of compression level (if used) of the imaging utility the image will range from 80 to 160 Gb, ideally you should use no compression, so that you will have a real 1:1 image.

A thread with a number of imaging tools links is here:

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=100299&hl=

Once you have an image (so that if anything goes wrong you can image the drive back and start from scratch), first thing to try, as suggested, is the use of Testdisk (win32 version), if you are lucky you can recover data this way.

Next would be the use of Photorec (companion to testdisk) to recover just files.

If the partition you have data on is NTFS, try first this:

http://memberwebs.com/stef/software/scrounge/

and this (COMMERCIAL):

http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm

(but the trial should be enough to see if it can find/recover data)

jaclaz

[Bushidou2007]

Just recovered my first HDD data using the getdataback fat. The problem with this software was that it actually saw my HDD as FAT16 instead of 32 so all the files were messed up with its default option.

Thanks again for all your help, hope my 500gb is intact or that will be a burden.