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Hey ,
I have a Seagate Barracuda 80Gb Harddisk. After doing a Repair install of Windows, my hd went bonkers !.
It doesn't show any contents at all. I'm prety sure i haven't formatted it at all. I tried using a live cd to check the HD out and it shows nothing. The entire space is shown as unpartitioned. Could this be a problem with the partition table?. Is there someway i can recover the data in the HD ?
Thanks
You may want to try a recovery tool such as Easy Recovery
http://www.ontrack.com/software/
Download a trial version.
Slave the drive in another machine and see if you can recover the data.
If you can see the data....buy the product...
how much the data is worth??
MLF
Thanks for the reply. The data isn't worth the price of the product though :-(
well see if you can see the data....then you know its recoverable...and the disk isnt physically mucked......you may be able to use something else....such as chkdsk, mbr.
I have recovered data from unrecognized\flucked up partitions before....
I think there may be some free tools out there
MLF
Hmmm,
Why did you do "a repair install of Windows"? The problems you noticed before this may give us some clues.
Check out the Microsoft tech support site for "recovery console" and in particular the command "fixmbr" it could be that your master boot record is screwed?
Be careful though, if it is a partitioning problem then writing a new MBR to the disk could well do more harm than good. Read the instructions carefully.........it should warn you if there is a partition problem.
If it is a partition problem you might try this:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
It is a free partition recovery tool ;)
You might try booting up to an XP cd or another Windows-type cd (Bart PE) and run "chkdsk /r c:" from a command prompt the next time you run into an issue with your hdd. It's usually one of the first things I do in troubleshooting an hdd. Doing a repair install of XP isn't going to fix a bad harddrive.
i can see my some partitions using a linux live cd now. It just appeared out of nowhere ! . Doing fdisk -l gives me the following result.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 ? 3112544 7678583 570754815+ 72 Unknown
Partition 1 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
phys=(357, 116, 40) logical=(3112543, 3, 9)
Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(357, 32, 45) logical=(7678582, 0, 39)
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 ? 674759 8418872 968014120 65 Novell Netware 386
Partition 2 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
phys=(288, 115, 43) logical=(674758, 0, 23)
Partition 2 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(367, 114, 50) logical=(8418871, 0, 12)
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda3 ? 7479526 15223639 968014096 79 Unknown
Partition 3 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
phys=(366, 32, 33) logical=(7479525, 4, 16)
Partition 3 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(357, 32, 43) logical=(15223638, 3, 7)
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda4 ? 11542725 11542947 27749+ d Unknown
Partition 4 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
phys=(372, 97, 50) logical=(11542724, 3, 3)
Partition 4 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(0, 10, 0) logical=(11542946, 3, 1)
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary.
Partition table entries are not in disk order
Disk /dev/hdb: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 * 1 9728 78140128+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
pretty screwed up!. I had only FAT partitions and one of them has mutated to a NOVELL NETWARE now.
Using chkdsk gave me the reply saying that one or two partitions cannot be recovered. Used fixmbr and wrote a new MBR, but things haven't changed.
nihil: I did the repair install of windows as it wouldn't boot saying that some dll file couldn't be found.
Please try the partition recovery tool:)
nihil: shall do it asap. I need to get a new HD to play master first. Thank you for your help.
nihil: That software was a life saver!!!. Thanks a lot dude. I really wish i could give u some reputation points but have to spread them first. I'm really amazed at the speed with which Testdisk recovered my partitions. Thanks Again :-) !. Having lost all that date made me feel like i was raped by a pack of wild gorillas.