Windows 2000 installer crashed partition corrupted

[clambo]

Hi all,

Looking for some help here. I have a Toshiba Portege 4010 with 2 windows partitions and 3 Linux Partitions(/root, /home, swap). My wife decided she didn't think she could live with Linux so she asked me to remove it and give her back the hard drive space.

So I used my Windows 2000 Pro SP1 install cd to delete the Linux partitions. Unfortunately, in the middle of deleting the Linux swap partition the system hung, forcing a reboot of the laptop. On reboot the laptop hung booting into Windows. I might add that the laptop was running Windows 2000 Pro SP4, previously. Attempted to boot into safe mode and last good configuration with out any luck. Next attempted to run the Windows 2000 Pro SP1 cd again and it freezes on the starting Windows screen.

Used Mandravia Live CD to boot the laptop and to see what could be recovered from the hard disk in particular important files on the NTFS C:drive where the Windows 2000 Pro OS was installed. According to Linux the partition table is corrupted and there are over 100 hard drive partions with the same size 7.4 Gb. As the hard drive is physcially only 28 Gb, this cannot be.

Would like any help in recovering the partition table and/or Windows 2000 Pro OS.

Toshiba Portege 4010
Pentium III 900 Mhz
512 RAM
28 - 30 Gb Hard Drive

Any advise appreciated.

Regards,
Clambo

 

[one4thumb]

Windows 2000 can not see some of the Partitions that Linux creats and vise versa. However find out what manufacture made the drive and download their low level format utilites, or use a third party utility.

This should resolve your issues

 

[wolluf]

buy an ide adapter (c. £5 here in uk) or a laptop drive usb enclosure (c. £15 here) and connect the drive to a windows 2k/xp PC. If that can't read it as is, you'll need some data recovery software if you want stuff off there (eg, getdataback).

Or you could try creating a BartPE CD (which if it can read it, then connecting to 2k/xp PC will almost certainly work) - but you'd have a problem saving anything you could read (which is why I suggested connecting to PC).

One thing occurs - can you get into recovery console? If so, could try running chkdsk /r.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;229716

btw - why didn't you use 2k's disk management (run diskmgmt.msc) to remove the linux partitions, rather than I presume starting a 2k installation?

 

[clambo]

Thanks for your help.

I got the partitions back using a utility called Partition Table Doctor. It had a boot cd image of the utility which I burned onto a cd. The system booted up into the FreeDos OS and the utility auto started, I had do some guessing as to how to use it as the character set was unreadable. The utility picked up straight away the problem with the Partition Table and asked if I wanted to fix it, which I agreed to.

Wolluf,

You're absolutely right, I should have used the Disk Management application in Windows 2K, my wife is still kicking me for not using it.

Thanks again for your recommendations, hopefully others will learn from my experience.

Regards,
Clambo