Extended Partition Troubles

[digh]

My WD600 HD crashed when rebooting after a program install. Disk was divided into two equal partitions. Programs on C and Data on D. I reistalled my old drive (It does not have all the new data, has a similar partition setup, but is only 13GB)as the master, and the crashed one as the slave. Win 98se shows only the primary partition on the crashed drive as D: and reports the size of the drive as 6.31MB. The extended partition on the old drive appears as E:, but the extended partition on the crashed drive does not appear.

FDISK sees an extended partition on the crashed drive, but does not assign it a letter:

With only the crashed drive installed FDISK reports:

Partition Status Type Mb System Usage
C: 1 A Primary Dos 6479 Fat32 11%
2 Extended Dos 6471 11%

Total 57,239

How can I get windows or DOS to see the partition so I can see if there is recoverable data. I own Spinrite 5.0, but it will need to see the missing extended drive first in DOS.

Thanks
digh
as in "digital"

 

[wolluf]

Sounds like you've 'lost' the container within extended partition. This site

http://home.arcor.de/christian_grau/rescue/

may be of use to you. If that's no good, can only suggest using Fdisk to recreate your drive in extended partition as it was (though I'm puzzled by the primary partition appearing as 6.31GB, when presumably it should be 30MB - you don't say what you were installing when it crashed - sounds like partition table on WD600 may be corrupted. Question - if its showing as 6.31GB, is all your data still visible?

 

[digh]

Yes that is strange about the 6.31GB. If I remember right, both partitions had about that much data on each. I had just installed and run adaware and rebooted when scandisk trashed the drive.

I downloaded Drive Rescue. Perhaps the boot sector on C got corrupted in the crash. No time to run the program now, though. Got to sleep sometime. I'll let you know how I make out.

Thanks
digh