Partition 1 Faliure

[pnx6969]

This one is really annoying me now !

ok here goes

ive got 2 hard disks on my comp, recently my primary hard disk failed, i have tried to fix the MBR but this is where the problem lies, in the bios the hdd is listed, SMART is enabled and reports both drive ok. but the hard drive spins up and fails to boot, after 2 - 3 minutes i get the error message disk boot faliure, im running win xp and tried to boot from cd to go into recovery console, i get as far as press any key to boot from cd then the system hangs. i then swaped drives and my slave became my master drive, that one is fine, loads no problems, if i put the other drive in on the slave windows fails to load.

made a boot disk and tried the FMBR command - nope - boot faliure again. tried to FDISK but that gives me the error msg drive 1 inaccessable. the only way i can get any info about the drive is using a the linux disaster recovery cd , the messages i get are timeout waiting for dma, dma timer expiry dma timeout retry.

this goes on for 5 cycles and then the cd boots to ram, when in the console i can view the 2 partitions i have created. i can understand that the primary partition is dead and buried as even after formating, resizing even formating from NTFS to FAT32 and back again nothing seems to work.

tried also to recreate the partition using partition magic 8, i load the boot disk that works fine, until it loads the rest from the cd and hangs again.


now the problem is that this happened as i was backing up my data from partition 2 on hard disk 1 to partition 2 of hard disk 2. unfortuntaely when i back up the existing data is overwritten, all my old back ups are completely unrecoverable, i have tried many different programs to see what i can recover but unfortunately there is nothing, so back to the matter in hand.

partition 2 on hdd 1 is reading from the linux cd is ok where partition 1 is reporting bad/failure i need to urgently recover the data from the 2nd partition as all of my customer data is on there. without spending a fortune and sending my hdd off for data to be recovered is there anyway or any tools that will be able to get this info for me.

I dont want to be sending the drive off as i know this can be very costly.

any help would be appreciated !

[glc]

You said you used "many different programs" to try to recover. Can you tell us what you have tried?

Without knowing if you have already tried it already, I'm going to suggest Ontrack Easy Recovery. You can download a trial which will tell you what it *can* recover if you purchase it. This costs a small fraction of what Ontrack would charge you if you sent in the drive.

[TheMajor]

I don't think you will be able to recover your data if you were saving it to an image files...the image file will probably be corrupted/damaged.

If u were just copying some files u will be able to recover some.

[pnx6969]

Ok i have tried ontrack easy recover but that cannot read the damamged partition so it halts, have tried active@ partition recovery, file scavenger file and partition recovery and handy recovery.

but as i said before - this all has to be done in DOS as my working hdd fails to boot if the other one is conected and oicked up in the bios, even if using on the raid channels (raid controller settings to act as ide 3 +4)

Originally Posted by glc You said you used "many different programs" to try to recover. Can you tell us what you have tried? Without knowing if you have already tried it already, I'm going to suggest Ontrack Easy Recovery. You can download a trial which will tell you what it *can* recover if you purchase it. This costs a small fraction of what Ontrack would charge you if you sent in the drive.

[glc]

If Easy Recovery can't read anything, I doubt any other software can.

[pnx6969]

i realise all data on the first partition cant be recovered thats fine i can live with that but its the info on the seccond partition that i need to recover, using the linux disaster recovery cd the second partition is reading ok - even lists the directory structure. its this data i need to recover

[kilgoretrout]

Depends on which linux livecd you are using. Knoppix has a cd burning program included, k3b, that looks similar to nero. If you can see the data in knoppix you can back it up to cd-r by using k3b.
Linux can't write to NTFS but can to FAT32. So if you have space available on a FAT32 partition, you can copy the files there. However, you have to do some command line stuff to get write access to partitions with knoppix so post back if this applies.

[pnx6969]

thanx for that, will give it a go later - then its time to trash the whole drive, see if i can cure the MBR faliure, will post back if successful