Recovering data from a drive I tried to convert to dynamic

[rannyman]

My system had only one drive in it. A IBM 120 GB drive. Running XP Pro with three partitions:

1 18g [E:] NTFS xp system drve
2 4g [C:] FAT32 had 98 installed on it. to be nuke after convert
3 ~102g [I:] EXTENDED With a logical NTFS data drive

I got the great (Read as stupid) idea to convert it to a dynamic disk.

after windows "Converted" the drive it rebooted and would not boot to the drive.

I then took a 2.6gb drive I was not using and formated it and installed XP on it.

XP does not assign it drive letters.

(Lets hope this formats right)

DISKPART show 6 Parts
Partition ### Type Size Offset
------------- ---------------- ------- -------
* Partition 1 Dynamic Data 18 GB 32 KB
Partition 2 Dynamic Data 4095 MB 18 GB
Partition 3 Extended 93 GB 22 GB
Partition 4 Logical 32 KB 102 GB
Partition 5 Logical 812 GB 126 GB
Partition 6 Logical 259 GB 369 GB

DSKPROBE shows 4
Partition ### System ID Boot Start End Relative Total
h/s/c h/s/c Sector Sectors
------------- ---------------- ------- ------- ----------- ---------- -------
Partition 1 Dynamic Data SYSTEM 1/1/0 254/63/1023 63 37415322
Partition 2 Dynamic Data SYSTEM 0/1/1023 254/63/1023 37415385 8385930
Partition 3 Extended - LBA NO_SYSTEM 0/1/1023 254/63/1023 45801315 195446790
Partition 4 Unknown Type NO_SYSTEM 0/0/0 0/0/0 0 0

All I have done so far is to cory the boot sector from the backup at the end of the part (and I only did that on the part 1 & 2)

Any Idea on how to fix this mess?

I thought that if I deleted the parts one at a time and recreated them without formating it might work, but diskpart reports "The selected partition may be neccessary to the operation of your computer, and may not be deleted." on part 1

Maybe if I change it to NO_SYSTEM in dskprobe first.

Any help would be grand I have a boat load of data on there that I need to get off.

Thanks

 

[rannyman]

One more thing.

The disk manaagement Snap-in show the drive as:

dymanic
Unreadable.

When I run dmdiag I get


---------- Consolidated LDM Configuration Data ----------

ERROR: scan operation failed:
A format error was found in the private region of the disk
ERROR: scan operation failed:
A format error was found in the private region of the disk
ERROR: scan operation failed:
A format error was found in the private region of the disk
ERROR: scan operation failed:
A format error was found in the private region of the disk

 

[kLy]

No idea how to fix this mess, but try this to see if you can get any extra info out of it:

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/ldmdump.shtml

but it probably won't work since it goes via the LDM API anyways and scan operations failed using dmdiag. Worth a shot though. This kind of problem is quite hard, especially when valuable data is involved.

good luck!

 

[rannyman]

Well it looks like I may have solved the problem. in dskprobe I change the first two part types from dynamic to fat32-lba and rebooted and they are back. I have deleted the extended partion and am going to see if I can rcover it by recreating it and coping the boot section from backup.