BM7 partition damage, bios error, a virus ?

[mullardel34]

I have two days of librarian work lost on my 30GB storage drive. I may have caused the problem by swapping the 30 gig drive for an 80 gig drive without reconfiguring Boot Magic (I was accessing the data partition only). The 30GB drive has two 8MB primary win98 partitions and one large data partition (no XP).

The motherboard BIOS recognizes both drive 1 (2GB) and drive 2 (30GB). Post completes and the boot process halts on drive 2 (D:). I can hear an intermittent buzzing from the drive while it tries to read the information. After awhile, the computer will boot from the floppy. I sysgened the D: drive and typed DIR to see the windows folders, yet no software has been able to read or access the drive properly. For some reason, the BIOS recognizes the drive correctly as 30GB, but once the information is saved, the BIOS shows a 2GB drive (with CYL and HEAD info for a 2 gig drive). The LANDZ info for the drive lists the proper number for 30GB. Post reports a 2GB drive everytime. The primary drive is a 2GB drive. Bios is Award v4.51PG. I had the virus protection disabled when the problem occurred. Other drives work fine when installed.

FDISK reports "Unable to access Drive 2" and "No partitions defined". Boot Magic reported "Error #8100, Unexpected error, Failed to find partition record in internal table, Press any key to reboot". Boot Magic doesn't always report the error, and sometimes the PC will continue on and boot from the floppy. I disabled Boot Magic to allow the PC to boot from the floppy consistently, and installed a controller card with it's own BIOS. Now that a controller card is installed, the software shows one logical drive D: with "Unallocated Space" and reports Drive 2 as volume "DISK 1" and FAT 16. This is correct for Drive 1, not Drive 2. The serial numbers reported are identical. Somehow this info was written to the wrong drive.

Other software run from the floppy reported "Can't read sector 0", "Unallocated", "Unknown", and at least once, listed volume "PARTITION" and 7.??? GB which is correct, but lacking the numeral 1 or 2 designating which partition. Also, the controller card BIOS recognized the drive correctly as 30GB, but the drive was still listed at post as 2Gb, producing the same problem as with the motherboard BIOS.

I need only to mirror the data partition to another drive, but the partition info is wrong or maybe worse, a virus. I did run three AV programs just before the problem occurred. I'm unable to run software from Windows on the primary drive unless I disconnect Drive 2. Anyone recognize this problem ? Know how to proceed ? Any suggestions ? Will restoring the MBR from a 40GB drive (same brand, WD) bring this drive back to life ?

[Gizmo]

Just as a small stab in the dark, I would run diagnostics on the drive you're having the trouble with and possibly restore the master boot record.

EDIT: Just for my own reference here, do you restore the master boot record by typing restore /mbr while in DOS mode?

[mullardel34]

Normally I would try Fdisk/MBR. But in this case, Fdisk can't read the disk. The book that I have for MS-DOS is 6.2, and perhaps that is why restore/mbr isn't listed. So far, I have not been able to see the data partition. I'm using Active@ Partition Recovery v2.1.1 demo from http://www.partition.recovery.com/ but it appears to fall short of what is needed. It's a solid application though.

[glc]

Try Ontrack Easy Recovery - it should be able to at least get your files off the drive. It's the best data recovery software I've ever seen. There is a free trial - but it's $199 to buy it.

restore /mbr is not a command I've ever heard of.

[mullardel34]

Making some progress ... When a software or a bios looks at drive 2, it is somehow given the other drive to look at (drive 1, 2GB). In the case of a bios, as long as there are two drives on the same IDE cable, the bios sees drive 2 as 30GB, but saves drive 1 (2GB) in the configuration with some error. When drive 2 is installed alone as master, software sees drive 2 as MS-RAMDRIVE. However, the bios then functions correctly, seeing 30GB and saving 30GB in the configuration. At that point, I ran Fdisk/MBR on drive 2 and gained access to one of the two primary partitions. The partition now boots windows, but the data partition isn't visible. I ran a diagnostic application from a floppy, but it couldn't see the drive correctly, and was pre-set to make changes that might interfer with recovery.

[mullardel34]

Data recovered ... Drive is OK, tested and reformatted. I tried to make the data partition visible again, but the software I found, worsened the situation. Lost many hours on this ... From now on, MBR's from all my drives will be backed up to a floppy.