after reinstall of 2K, all sec. drives show as FS RAW or unknown

[the xt guy]

My computer was running a dual boot setup of Win 2k and Xandros. The Win2K setup was about 2 years old and I was having problems with it, so I decided I needed to reinstall 2K. i also wanted to add a third OS (Win 98SE).

My boot drive is a 120gb Maxtor IDE hooked to the MB first IDE controller master. It was divided into two equal 60gb portions with 2K and Xandros on each 60 gb. The slave drive on the first IDE controller is a 500gb. IDE Hitachi.

The two drives on the second IDE controller on the MB are a DVD-RW drive and a CD-RW. I also have another HD controller card (Promise TX133) in a PCI slot which has 4 hard drives connected to it (all IDE, two 200gb, one 500 gb and a 1Tb SATA with a Rosewill adapter to convert the SATA to IDE interface for the Promise Controller card.) All these drives on the computer are formatted NTFS.

Before formatting the 120 gb drive, I disconnected the drives off the Promise controller card. I used gparted to format the 120 gb into primary and extended partitions of 30 gb and 90 gb. (When I install Xandros later, it can shrink down the 90 gb partition to install itself on.)

I then installed Win 98SE on to the 30 gb partition, letting Windows format it to FAT 32. I was careful to disconnect the 500 gb drive on the primary slave, so Windows wouldn't try to run chkdsk or something on it and screw it up, since it is NTFS.

I then installed 2K on the 90 gb. partition, 2K formatting as NTFS and let Windows make the dual-boot menu for the two OS.

My version of Win2K only has service pack SP2. I know that SP2 doesn't have 48 bit LBA support, but it is installed with SP4. I have SP4 on a CD (from MS) so I ran SP4. I do have a patch to enable LBA 48 bit on 2K, it adds the correct line to the registry. I ran that after SP4.

Even though I'm running 2K, I cannot access any of the secondary HD's (the primary slave or any of the 4 drives on the promise controller). Win2K shows them all as unformatted.

If I run gparted, all the drives I cannot access are not shown as having a file system. All the drives are seen in the BIOS and all the correct size. Remember, I had all this setup running yesterady, so all the hardware works and supports 48 bit LBA.

I do have a software program I bought years ago called "Restorer 2000 Professional" which has saved my data more than once. If I install this software, it shows the problem drives as not having a file system. However, if I run a scan on the individual drives (takes hours, extremely slow) it shows NTFS file system and all my files are there, directory structure intact and everything looks exactly as it should be. It can recover the data, but it cannot write it back to the same drive, it needs to be written to another drive. Problem is, all my secondary drives are partially full of data. If I went this route, I would need to buy another huge HD (at least 1 tb) to recover the files to.

Is there some flag in the HD first sector that shows the file system on the drive, and it somehow got deleted? What happened?

Edited October 4, 2009 by the xt guy

[pointertovoid]

Weird. I tend to believe what GParted tells.

You could try PtEdit32. It gives more low-level information than GParted and allows you to set the partition information without touching your documents.

ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_...es/PTEDIT32.zip

on W2k it requires admin session, on W98 you must add Pqvxd.vxd taken from vfd_folder.exe at Symantec.

From what you describe, I guess the Promise driver is installed. Anyway, the Promise adapter works without an added driver as well. And this wouldn't explain the slave disk on the mobo's host.

This reminds me - but it isn't the right explanation - of the special sector Promise takes on the disks to keep Raid information. When HdTune and colleagues write on this sector, you lose the Raid. Rebuild it identically, you get your data back. Next time, "low-level-format" the disks attached to the Promise host, and then this sector is protected.

Or use a Sil0680a host, it's better than the Promise in any aspect.

[pointertovoid]

Yes, there are some reserved places on the disk that describe the volumes.

The beginning of the disk tells where the volumes are, how big, and which one to boot.

Each volume then tells its own type and may contain something bootable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_partitioning

And PtEdit32 allows you to read and write in hex exactly this kind of information, and gives some interpretation.

So if only the information "this is Ntfs" is missing (...would be a piece of luck) you could try to restore it.

[the xt guy]

Pointer, thanks for the reply.

Yes it is weird. I have had this kind of a problem once before, but all I did was to enable 48 bit LBA and everything reappeared as if "by magic" .

Well, I think for now I will use the disk recovery software I've got, since it can clearly see the data and has always been able to recover everything I needed. I may have to get another HD but then one can never have too much drive space (although I do have one 200gb WD, so I may be able to shift things around and save most of my data.)

Once I have the data saved from a drive then I'll see what ptedit does. If I lose my data then, well it won't matter. BTW, I did have some of my data backed up from one HD to another, but I wasn't planning on all 5 HD's to be borked at the same time.

OT, but the spare 200gb HD I have is formatted in FAT 32. I will have to reformat it to NTFS, as some of my files are bigger than 4 gb. The interesting thing is that the 200gb FAT 32 reads as 186.3 gb while the 200gb NTFS formatted drives read as 189.9 gb! I guess the FAT32 file system uses up an additional 3.6 gb of room for overhead.

Edited October 5, 2009 by the xt guy

[jaclaz]

Well, I think for now I will use the disk recovery software I've got, since it can clearly see the data and has always been able to recover everything I needed. I may have to get another HD but then one can never have too much drive space (although I do have one 200gb WD, so I may be able to shift things around and save most of my data.)

PLease DON'T (if it's "years old") .

Use TESTDISK, which is surely up to date, most probably you just have an overwritten partition table:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

And comes both as Windows and Linux.

jaclaz

[pointertovoid]

I would also begin with PtEdit32 (just for not having used TESTDISK up to now).

It can display the partition and volume information without touching it.

It allows to save this information before your try any repair, like forcing the few bits who tell "this is Fat32".

And it allows to revert the volume information you saved before, in case the changes you made didn't improve.

So this is a rather harmless option and I would consider it before other methods like a backup, whose effects are less predictable.

[the xt guy]

Well, I tried ptedit. Unfortuntaely it did not help. As for the "Restorer 2000 Professional" software, I bought it back in 2005so it is compatible with 2K SP4. I already have run it on several of the drives and have recovered the data. It takes forever to scan (a 500 gb drive takes about 3-1/2 hours and that doesn't include the time to copy the files to another drive) but it does work.

What worries me now is what happened to get me into this state. A reinstall of an O/S shouldn't make all the other HD's inaccessible. Like I said, it happened once before but enabling 48 bit LBA was the key. Not this time though. Perhaps I should consider backing everything up to an external USB drive as well as another internal drive.

Edited October 7, 2009 by the xt guy