Missing HDD Letter from slave drive XP

[asiandawn]

Alright, I have searched several sites in trying to find the answer but I have not been sucessful as of yet. My parents have a seagate about 40 gigs. This drive was the primary, master drive that holds the OS (XP home or MCE I really can't remember). Well they did something (don't know what)that will not allow the system to fully boot into xp. The system will POST but only gets upto the blue windows xp screen. I have changed the jumper settings to a slave drive, and put this in another machine (2 to be exact) so that I can remove some data off of the drive. The bios sees the drive, but the drive doesn't come up in "my computer", I went into disk management, and can see the drive there but there is no volume letter assigned. In disk manager the drive shows as being a healthy NTFS partition with the capacity of 38.29GB, and 29.35GB free space. I have tried to assign a new drive letter but the only option that I've been given with this drive is to delete the partition. I have refreshed, and rescaned the drives but there is no changes. Can anyone help me out in this situation? either with some kind of forensics tools to remove the data that I need or some way to assign a new drive letter so that the drive can be accessed. Thanks

 

[Freestone]

A lot of users have used GetDataBack (

http://www.runtime.org/)

with good results. Note that there are separate versions for FAT and NTFS, and it is not free software, but does feature a trial to see what data may be recoverable.

XP has a command-line utility called DISKPART that may reveal more information about the partition on the drive. Be careful with this tool.

Start, Run, CMD
diskpart
select disk 1 <=== or whatever drive number shows in Disk Management
detail disk
list partition
select partition 1 <=== or whatever partition number is on the drive
detail partition
exit

What information is returned for the detail disk, list partition and detail partition?

 

[asiandawn]

alright, here's what comes up.

Partition 1
Type : 44
Hidden: yes
Active: yes
There is no volume associated with this partition.

 

[cjcoyle]

Try putting the drive back into the original computer, don't forget to change the jumper back to master. From another machine, download a dos boot disk (bootdisk.com) and boot to that. Once you've done this type: fdisk /mbr at the command prompt, then reboot once that's done (it'll return to the prompt after a moment). If this doen't help, press F8 right when POST completes and you'll have some boot options, safe mode and debugging are my 2 favorites. Do either of these help? If so check out your boot.ini, autoexec and config for any abnormalities. Also remove all cookies and temp files from IE. No Success? try booting off the OS CD and repair it from there. Good luck!

-Chris

 

[Freestone]

Partition type 44 is a GoBack partition. You had GoBack installed on the old drive.

See thread751-1274590 on how one person handled your situation or you can try installing GoBack on the new drive in order to use the old drive again.

 

[Freestone]

I had forgotten this gem from My Archive on removing GoBack: micker377's post in thread751-1261568 , though that mentions partition type 45.

I found a link to the GB_Prog.exe mentioned. I have never downloaded nor tried this file myself, so I can not vouch for it, but I present it as another possible solution in addition to the ones in my previous post.

ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/linked_files/GoBack/GB_Prog.exe