xpcraze Posted January 16, 2006 Share Posted January 16, 2006 Hi all,My Internet Explorer was crashing and bringing the system unstable so I decided to delete entire OS (Windows XP Pro SP2) and reinstall it from scratch.Main board is Asus NCCH-DL with dual Xeon 2.8GHz CPU's, Crucial 1GB DDR400 RAM.Prior to rebuild I had 2 x Seagate SATA drives (ST3200822AS) split in 4 and 3 NTFS partitions each and running individualy (ie no RAID enabled).Prior to rebuilding XP, I disconnected my second SATA drive which I use for storing of large video footages and family photos and my music.I was not aware of XP's 128 / 137GB limit and I rebuilt the OS (with no SP1/2 as yet) then replugged this drive as a second drive the same way as it was running before. XP could see the second drive as 128GB only!!! Since then I did all MS auto updates and installed SP1 and SP2 and the OS can now see the whole drive (in the drive manager under admin tools), however it says it's not formatted and it sees it as 1 partition of 128GB and 58.31GB unpartitioned space. Obviously I have data on this drive (I hope it's still there) and would not want to reformat it, do you possibly know if there is any way that I can see the original 3 NTFS partitions and retrieve my data from this drive please?Any help on this would be greatly appreciated!Desperate for help Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest bush-911 Posted January 16, 2006 Share Posted January 16, 2006 i don't know. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xpcraze Posted January 16, 2006 Author Share Posted January 16, 2006 i don't know.thanks bush-911, anyone with a bit more creativity please? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeremy Posted January 16, 2006 Share Posted January 16, 2006 See how much hassle IE causes people. *sigh* Just use Opera/Firefox and your troubles are over. lolSorry, I don't have much creativity this morning. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cluberti Posted January 16, 2006 Share Posted January 16, 2006 http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/NtfsDos.htmlor, even better:http://www.winternals.com/Products/Adminis...ak/Default.aspx Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tommyp Posted January 16, 2006 Share Posted January 16, 2006 I'll be a bit brave and try a helpful answer instead. IE has nothing to do with enabling the "big lba". Check out this http://www.48bitlba.com/tools.htm. All you really need to do is make a regedit file and you're ok. In the meantime, if you wrote anything to the drive, consider your old data corrupt. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tarquel Posted January 16, 2006 Share Posted January 16, 2006 I've just had a look at the tool the above poster mentions. I've just run it on my system and it says:Windows XP Service Pack 2 is installed. It is not necessary to set EnableBigLba in the Windows registry for this version of Windows. There is nothing you need to do.so providing that you have SP2 it would seem, thats all there is to it in order to support these larger drives.However, if you had the drive plugged in while it was installing SP2 [or something similar], maybe it has altered the HDD in some way.The possibility of the data still being there may exist still as maybe its only altered the MBR of the HDD. You could try looking at the HDD using Partition Magic 8 if you have it [though a bootable method - not within windows] and see if the HDD contains anything at all.You could also try plugging the HDD into a friends system that is running SP2 and see if that produces any joy.Also, it may be to do with the drivers you used. You might want to get the latest from the web or if you have done, try some older ones or search the forum of the manufacturer of the HDD or chipset [VIA for example]to see if anyone else has had this problem.I cant guarantee that anything i have said wont mess it up completely - but they are some things I'd try first.Good luck and let us know if you get anywhere Nath. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jroc Posted January 16, 2006 Share Posted January 16, 2006 Im also curious if you also made that drive 'active' in computer management console....if not..then it would have to be set to active in order for XP to see its already NTFS Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tarquel Posted January 16, 2006 Share Posted January 16, 2006 I thought that "Active" means that the partition is bootable - but its been a while since I've needed to do that at home or at work so I'm not 100% sure.CheersNath. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xpcraze Posted January 16, 2006 Author Share Posted January 16, 2006 I'll be a bit brave and try a helpful answer instead. IE has nothing to do with enabling the "big lba". Check out this http://www.48bitlba.com/tools.htm. All you really need to do is make a regedit file and you're ok. In the meantime, if you wrote anything to the drive, consider your old data corrupt.Thanks to all for the links and info, I will have to do some reading now... already tried a couple of tools from tommyp's link above, even though I already enabled big LBA manually through the registry.Did the 48big LBA patch from above link again and it passed! Rebooted the system and the drive is still seen as 128GB partition + 58.31GB unpartitioned space, so the drive is recognized as 200GB, but no sign of my old 3 NTFS partitions.The drive was unplugged while I was installing SP1+2, however I plugged it in after reinstalling XP Pro core.The only thing I did to the drive, I made the 128GB active (in XP management console), which I now believe is wrong and not quite sure if this would have altered old partitions info and data.I will see if I can get Partion Magic and boot the system with the second drive only, then examin it.Since the drive is seen in the Bios fine, do you think I could modify boot.ini file and change the line for the second disk to reflect real partition sizes? Will let you know if I get any resuts Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr Snrub Posted January 16, 2006 Share Posted January 16, 2006 The drive was unplugged while I was installing SP1+2, however I plugged it in after reinstalling XP Pro core.The only thing I did to the drive, I made the 128GB active (in XP management console), which I now believe is wrong and not quite sure if this would have altered old partitions info and data.I would agree, that you modified the partition table on that disk with XP RTM means that it probably fixed up the table to what it thought was the maximum.Since the drive is seen in the Bios fine, do you think I could modify boot.ini file and change the line for the second disk to reflect real partition sizes?BOOT.INI is only for marking bootable partitions, it doesn't actually define anything.NTLDR reads the partition tables in a chain from the disks themselves - this information is now corrupted and needs fixing.There may be a tool which can analyse disks to present what it thinks might be the start and end of partitions, but it's more reliable as a manual process (using something like DskProbe), and if certain sectors have been overwritten then it's virtually impossible.Unfortunately most of the "partition repair tools" cost money and don't have guarantees.I hope you have that data backed up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tarquel Posted January 17, 2006 Share Posted January 17, 2006 Here's some of the products out there - and some may be just enough to fix the problem but choose carefully PowerQuest Volume Manager / Partition Magic - http://www.powerquest.com/Ranish Partition Manager - http://www.ranish.com/part/-from the readme-2. Can restore RPM's MBR in case it was overwritten by some other program (e.g.: fdisk /mbr) or after a new OS installation (thereby establishing the link to the "lost" RPM partition table).Partition Resizer - http://www.zeleps.com/ [freeware but make sure you read the info fully first]They are a possible there to try [theres probably more].Also, I'd suggest if the data is really important, that you get hold of another 200GB HDD and use a tool like ghost to clone the existing partition and info exactly how it is on the troubled HDD. Dunno which tool would be the best for that - ideally one that copies it exactly as it appears on the source HDD.In this way, if you mess up the first attempt, you could copy the hdd back from the backup hdd and try again....hope that makes sense - tired now Regards and item number two looks good - in that it can be used to restore a HDD's MBR -according to what it finds on the HDD - cud be the answer in my opinion. Have had them in my toolkit for years but never used them - well - not in a very long time.Good luck.Nath Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xpcraze Posted January 17, 2006 Author Share Posted January 17, 2006 I am happy man now (almost)! Managed to retrieve most of my data.Firstly I played with Partition Magic 8 (dos bootable), Testdisk, Partition Table Doctor and messed up things a bit, I thought I lost all the data.Then I tried a few utilities including On Track's Easy Disk Recovery and "revived" the drive, at least I could see that most of the data was still there.I then booted newly installed XP and installed Partition Magic 8.5 and moved/merged partitions about, then simply used it's integrated browser to copy / paste data to C drive. Copy/paste operation is lightening fast under Partition Magic's file browser! Now I am burning it all to DVD's. I am still missing some data and I believe it resides on one partition which Partition Magic sees as Linux file system and I am unable to do anything with it at the moment, will give another try On Track Easy Disk Recovery (very impressed with the speed of this program) once I burned all these DVD's LOL Thanks for all the info again guys! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tarquel Posted January 19, 2006 Share Posted January 19, 2006 Whoops....forgot to mention the OnTrack tools too Glad you got the most of it back - good luck with the rest CheersN. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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