200GB drives and Win2KPro

[Audio2U]

Greetings on and all,
I have a tale of woe, but I'll keep it as brief and painless as possible.
About 8 months ago, I bought a Seagate Barracuda 200GB IDE drive (I'm not at home at the moment, so I'm not sure if it was the ST3200021A or the 22A). Anyway, when I first installed it and partitioned it with Partition Magic v6, PM only showed 137GB.
After some surfing round the web, I found out about 48bit LBA, and I enabled that (updated the BIOS, too).
So, up until a week ago, I had 3 partitions on the drive in question.
D:\ 30GB
G:\ 100GB
H:\ 60GB
(Yes, that's only 190GB, I know! That's how much usable space you get out of a 200GB drive once it's formatted. I'm OK with that.)
So, I've been happily dumping data onto these 3 partitions for months. Suddenly, a week and a half ago, I start getting some weird things happening.
Adobe Audition (an audio editing program... used to be Cool Edit Pro) started telling me that .wav files I'd created were suddenly corrupted. Audition couldn't interpret the data. This struck me as weird for 2 reasons.
1. I'd created the files myself, and saved them in .wav format, and
2. Audition supports an amazing number of different audio file formats, and for it to say it couldn't interpret the data was unheard of (for me, at least!).
Anyway, I had this one folder where I'd been saving a bunch of .wav files. These were gym music tapes that my wife uses. They'd been recorded from cassette, and saved as 44k 16bit stereo. Each was around a half hour in length.
Suddenly, more and more of them were becoming corrupted. I decided to try and copy them to another drive/partition.
Now, the WHOLE folder refused to be copied, citing access violations and what not.
So, I thought, time to run Diskeeper. Diskeeper told me it couldn't analyze the drives as Windows had scheduled Checkdisk to run at the next boot up.
Fine. I'll reboot now then, shall I?
After a reboot (during which I saw NO checkdisk activity whatsoever, the system comes up and both G:\ and H:\ no longer exist!!!! WTF?
Not only has the folder of .wav files gone, but the whole freakin' partition has gone! All up, I lost about 60GB of data across the 2 partitions. Not happy.
I've spent a week trading e-mails with a data recovery guru called Svend Olaf Mikkelsen, and he seems to think that there is a problem with Win2000 and data storage beyond 128GB (not 137GB, which is the limit imposed by the 28bit LBA mode).
I ran EasyRecoveryPro, but it only found about 10GB of the data, and it was the data I was least concerned about getting back.
I also ran Norton AV about 5 times with the latest definition lists. Nuffin'.
Svend seems to think that this is always going to be an issue once the total data stored on the drive (irrespective of partitioning) exceeds 128GB (ie 20GB of data on D:\, 80GB of data on G:\ and anything more than 28GB of data on H:\, and so forth).
Surely, there must be something else going on here, right?
Seagate and/or Microsoft would have come out with an update/patch if the problem affected your ability to fill the drive with more than 128GB of data, wouldn't they?
Anyway, at this point, I've given up any hope of seeing that data again, but I do want to find out what is causing it, so I don't get hit by it again.
Thoughts?

[Tim_axe]

Can you please attach a screen shot after performing this process:

• Go to Control Panel
• Go to Administrative Tools
• Go to Computer Management
• Go to Disk Management (under "Storage")
• Screen shot

Hopefully Windows can tell us if there is anything wrong here that could be corrected easily. Cheers.

[Audio2U]

Sure thing.
When I get home tonight, I'll do that.
Cheers,
Bruce.

[nihil]

Hi Bruce,

I've spent a week trading e-mails with a data recovery guru called Svend Olaf Mikkelsen, and he seems to think that there is a problem with Win2000 and data storage beyond 128GB (not 137GB, which is the limit imposed by the 28bit LBA mode).

Bollix! or however you say that in svensk

This is purely a BIOS/MoBo issue....................Windows as you know it has no such problems.

For example, the 128/137Gb problem is the same thing, it all depends on your notation

Please read this: http://support.microsoft.com/default...roduct=win2000

It sounds as if your HDD is about to die on you, please try running a diagnostics tool and let us know the result.

Johnno

[Audio2U]

Y'know what?
I only read that MS article earlier today while I was at work. And although I upgraded my BIOS when I first got the drive (and couldn't see more than 137GB), I didn't (at that stage) learn about the registry edit that was required!
I've just added the registry string (as quoted in the MS article), so maybe tht will make a difference!
Anyway Tim_Axe, I'll attached that jpeg you were after. Interesting, Disk Manager says it's 157GB of free space, but Partition Magic 6 reported it as 2 lots of free space (1x100GB, and 1x60GB), so PM obviously recognises something in the way of the prtitions that were there.
I'll post this, and reboot, and see if the registry string makes any difference.
Cheers,
Bruce.

[Tim_axe]

Well, the good news is that your data should still be there.

The only problem is that recovering your lost partitions it will likely be difficult. (I'm not sure how to do it since I have no programs to work with partitions) Were the partitions that were lost NTFS or FAT32?

I've only had a possibly similar situation when I had my disks partitioned weirdly. For some reason LILO (I dual booted at the time) on my machine was somewhere in the middle of another partition, but it was pointed to correctly and booted fine, but when I filled up one of the disks it overwrote that part (I think I had deleted the Linux partitions but LILO was still there in now unallocated space) and my system stopped booting because another file overwrote it.


I think what happened was that your partition information became corrupted (possibly a file overwrote it because you partitioned the drives with 3rd party software and Windows didn't see the end of the partition correctly?). Windows still recognizes the disk, but it doesn't realize there are 2 partitions allocated for your G and H drives -- the free space. Since you can't afford to loose the data you can't just tell windows to re-allocate it and format it NTFS. So I'm not sure how you can recover the partiton information to make that free space useful again, though it is probably possible.

[nihil]

Hi Bruce,

It sounds as if your drive is just within warranty, so I would certainly get the Seagate diagnostics tools and run them just in case the HDD is failing and that was the cause of the corruption.

Cheers

[Audio2U]

Thanks for the info, guys.
Tim_Axe,
The partitions were NTFS, and as for the data, well, I've pretty much given up hope of ever seeing it again. Which is a right royal PITA, but, as they say in the classics, "**** happens".

Nihil,
I'll give the Seagate tools a whirl, but I'm not sure that it's a drive failure issue. Still, got nothing (more) to lose, so what the hell?

I'll let you know how I go.
Cheers,
Bruce.

[nihil]

Hi Bruce,

You might try this afterwards:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/index.html?testdisk.html

here is some information about it:

http://www.sleuthkit.org/informer/sl...former-15.html

Or this:

http://www.andypryke.com/pub/Partiti...eationSoftware

Cheers

[Audio2U]

Nihil,
Thanks for those links.
I downloaded testdisk, and got in touch with Christophe via e-mail.
After a couple of e-mails, he gave me some instructions, which brought back most of the data. Some got lost, but I can live that.
Thanks heaps.
Cheers,
Bruce.