HD continues to defy repair

[LadyGoddess]

Hello, I wrote a couple months back about my HD suddenly failing with a NTLDR is
Missing message (see:

http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/1141878705).

I am
finally done with school and able to slave the broken Maxtor drive to the newer Western
Digital HD.

Upon restarting the computer after slaving the Maxtor, I went into My Computer and
found the HD drive showing up as drive E. However, it is being listed as a 10 meg
HD instead of 200 gig HD that it is. When I click on the drive, I see:

ntdect.com
ntldr

All the help from the earlier post was of no help in the end. I was told that I should
have been able to slave the old HD to the new one, start the computer and wa~lah,
find the old HD waiting for me to open it and drag and copy my files out of it. What
is going on? I'm feeling very anxious now.

The bad drive in question is a Maxtor Diamondmax 10 ATA133 200 GIG HD 7200 RPM

Thank you.

 

[Freestone]

I have to disagree with edfair. The partiton table is in error due to two facts: the partition size used to be the entire drive size, not 10MB, and as wolluf has pointed out, there is no way the partition could be FAT, it'd have to be at least FAT32.

At this point I think you are looking at trying to get the partition table fixed. I don't have any suggestions for tools however.

 

[wolluf]

LadyGoddess

I suspect you'll get nothing from this drive (apart from via the expensive option) - the maxtor diagnostic said the drive had failed, which I suspect means you can't do anything with it.

The only thing I might try would be to delete the existing partition (if it will let you) and create a new one to match what it was originally. It obviously wasn't FAT, so must have been fat32 or more likely ntfs. Deleting and creating partitions won't touch any data (though I doubt it will let you) - and might let the data recovery apps in. If it was fat32, you'll have to use fdisk or other partitioning utility as XP won't create one > 32GB.

Good luck!

 

[LadyGoddess]

I want to make 100% sure of this, though I'm googling the answer too, deleting the one partition that shows up in DOS mode (when I'm pretending that I want to install windows onto the bad drive), that will *not* delete the data?

I was going to see if I could create a partition in the bad drive (very small) and install XP on it. If this works, with a working copy of XP back on the drive, I should have minimal data loss and should be able to get back into the drive now that all the boot up files will be rewritten onto it.

How does this plan sound?

I really am appreciating your patience here.

 

[Freestone]

You don't want to write anything to the bad drive otherwise you are almost sure of overwriting data and lowering considerably the chances of recovering anything.

I agree with wolluf regarding deleting the 10MB partition and creating a new partition the same size as the original. You will not format this new partition though.

What program or utility was used to create the original 200GB partition?

 

[LadyGoddess]

I cannot find the 10MB partition when I got down to DOS level. It was just the full 200GB partition, though it did say that 3 MB were left over.

I only partitioned the original into one giant one using Windows XP. Also I realized that earlier when the drive first failed in March, the reason why I could not repair the Windows installition is because to the Maxtor, there is apparently NO Windows XP on it any longer. I believe this raises all kinds of new thoughts when XP is not even recognized as having been on the drive in the first place.

 

[LadyGoddess]

I finally found a program which managed to go in and retrieve my entire HD, Ontrack Recovery Tool. I have managed to copy all my data and burn it in just one night. All 150 gigs. Apparently having next to no programs running equals super fast burning times also.

Yesterday I recieved the replacement HD.

I want to thank all of you for your kind help. Why this particular program worked when none of the others would, I cannot answer. However I am grateful for the gentle nudges and pushes which led me to this. Hundreds of dollars have been saved, my data has been saved in full, and I am happy with the results.

Thanks!

 

[djc2004]

LadyGoddess,

I have the same exact problem you did. I have put off extracting the data because I was told it wasn't recoverable but obviously it is. For example, when we examined the drive it said there was no data there only the few MB partition but obviously it is there. Can you email me at djc2004@gmail.com, I'd love to pick your brain about the program you used to extract the data and how you went about doing so i.e. did you have an external hard drive USB and ran that data software on that drive, etc.

 

[G0AOZ]

The Ontrack Recovery Tool was probably Easy Recovery Professional. I have used this (version 6) to good effect several times when recovering data.

The setup I often use is as follows:-

Boot drive - on primary IDE, using either W2K Pro or XP Pro. Easy Recovery Pro installed on here.
Bad drive - on secondary IDE.
Recovery drive - blank formatted NTFS IDE drive on Promise PCI controller card.

Each drive is single Master, so there is no CD or any other drive attached.

Hope that helps...

ROGER - G0AOZ.