Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations Chris Miller on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

Extended partition failure..... 1

Status
Not open for further replies.

Hobe

Technical User
Oct 12, 2003
3
GB
I had a 40G slave hard drive partitioned into 2, the active partition being 10G and the other being 30G. This HD was connected through the ATA 66 cables.

The other day I was surfing around and downloading when suddenly my PC crashed, there wasn't much that I could do so I reset the machine. I was then waiting for WIN XP Pro to reboot but it never did and kept reseting itself having flashed the blue screen.

After some distress and experimenting I found that booting up with ordinary IDE cables worked but was incredibly slow. I noticed that windows was trying to access my slave HD and that it made a quiet buzzing sound every 2 seconds.

Windows detects the extended partition but can't read its name and thinks it is unformatted. I tried using Partiton Magic 8 to see what was wrong but it came up with some CRC error. I also found some software online called Active Partition recovery which boots from DOS. This programme could read the information on the extended partition so I know its still there....

Is there anything I can do to retrieve the data?
PLEASE HELP ME...
 
Sounds like you need data recovery software. Its not obvious from your description if the drive is damaged - or just the filestore/partition table (is it fat32 or ntfs, btw?).

Might be worth downloading drive manufacturer's diagnostic utility (most have one on their website) - to check status of drive. Also - you could try booting into recovery console ( If it can see slave drive, try running chkdsk on it from there.

Here are a few data recovery tools recommended by others on tek tips:

Free:
(probably no good if ntfs filestore).

Commercial:

Google will find you many others.
 
Oh, forgot to mention that the HD is NTFS.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top