HELP! - Lost my hdd partitions

**Linus** · 09-12-2003, 12:27 PM

Okay, I'm trying not to freak out here, with only mild success.

I was just playing around with the manual hard drive settings in the BIOS of my desktop PC, trying to get things to boot quicker. I think I set it on CHS (?) and kept the numbers (heads, cylinders, etc.) the same as they had appeared after an auto-detect. I rebooted, and instead of loading up the operating system it reported my 160GB drive as 136GB and rebooted with no interaction from me. So I changed the settings back, and windows still wouldn't boot. Odd. Booted to my WinXP CD, and it claims there are NO PARTITIONS on my drive. I immediately powered down and unplugged the drive.

I have a LOT of stuff on this drive that's very important to me. Many years of old emails, a huge collection of music and movies - irreplaceable stuff. I would be willing to pay damn near any price to get this stuff back.

So what are my options? If there's anything I can do with a very low chance of making things worse, I'd be willing to try it. I'm sure there are lots of data recovery services out there that would LOVE to take my money...anyone have notably good experiences with a particular outfit? Naturally, I'm looking for the cheapest way to get all my data back in one piece.

Any help would be most appreciated. I'm dyin' here.

Linus

**Gutter** · 09-12-2003, 01:26 PM

Ah yes, that's always a fun feeling. The data's still there, but the MBR is probably toast. Search google for something like "partition recovery." There's a tool called RESQDISK out there that may help. Or try this: http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/~tkuurstra/DiskPatch.htm It'll tell you what it can recover, and if it can, you'll have to buy a copy for $40.

Data recovery is a waste of money unless the drive is dying.

Might I suggest starting a good backup regiment? A $150 CD burner and a stack of CD-Rs is all you need.

**osirisdon** · 09-12-2003, 01:39 PM

hmmmmm this is because of messing with the BIOS. I thikn your problem is with the motherboard now. Try to take the Hard drive out and put it in another computer, make sure you do the whole slave thingamajinks so you can just get into the partition and not boot off it.

BIOS is motherboard related, I dont think messing with it, can destroy data on the hard drive.

**Sh0cker** · 09-12-2003, 02:04 PM

If you have another computer - download Partition Magic; hook up that hdd to your working pc then check to the missing sectors or partitions. Its possible that you somehow hid partition and now you cant see it.
Partition Magic doesnt erase your data while fixing your partitions, try to use it first - it should help.

**Linus** · 09-12-2003, 02:51 PM

Gutter - Thanks for getting my searches started. And you're right, I need a backup regimen. Been meaning to get around to that for a while...

osirisdon - I think it somehow nuked the partition when it tried to boot to it while set up to use a different setting (CHS, LBA, Large, whatever) than it should. Pretty sure it isn't a motherboard issue anymore (now that I've set it back on autodetect), but I'll see if I can get it into another machine just in case. No data should be written if it isn't being booted, right?

Sh0cker - I should be able to fix it without using Partition Magic (which costs $$). See below.

After some searching on other forums and the web, I've found a ton of different software paclages that should be able to recover everything - for a price. Even better, I have a friend with a copy of R-Studio, which should do the trick. Now I just need to get my hands on 160GB of storage space to copy the drive to (using HD Copy?) before doing anything that may write data, overwriting what's already there. I'll probably buy another 160GB drive and return it when I'm done, minus 15% restocking fee.

Thanks for all the help, guys!

**bh76** · 09-12-2003, 11:30 PM

If it were me, I'd double-check the bios just to be on the safe side. If the bios isn't seeing the hard drive correctly, trying to do a recovery will just make things worse. Many bios's have an option that'll reset everything back to factory defaults. Try that. If there's a hard drive-related option that gives you the following choices "normal, large, lba", make sure it's set for lba. Before continuing make sure the system is seeing all 160gigs of your hard drive.

Assuming that the bios is configured correctly, keep in mind that just because windows won't see your drive, doesn't necessarily mean that your data is gone.

At work, we had a Windows 2000 server that was acting up (Exchange wasn't working right). Figured we'd try a reboot and see if that helps. It came up with an "inaccessible boot device" error. Booted from the Windows 2000 cd. It didn't see the partitions on the drive. Tryed using the 2000 cd to boot into the recovery console. None of the data files were visible from there. Tried putting the drive in a Windows 2000 Professional machine to see if we could get at the data from there. The data wasn't accessible from there either.

We put the drive in a Windows 98 machine, booted it into DOS (command prompt only from the F8 boot menu), and used the freeware read-only version of NTFSDOS. Presto, it mounted the NTFS partitions and assigned them drive letters. All of the data files were still there. Since we weren't able to find a good way to copy the files and retain all of the long file names from DOS, we tried rebooting into Windows 98 and running the freeware version of "NTFS for Windows 98". It wasn't able to access the partitons. At this point we were getting kind of desperate so we tried "PARAGON NTFS for Win 98". It was able to see the NTFS partitons. Using this utility we were able to copy all of the data onto another drive. Finally, we grabbed a spare drive, reinstalled 2000 server, then copied over all of the data files.

Assuming that your drive was formatted in NTFS format, try booting the system from a Window 98 boot disk, then run the freeware read-only version of NTFSDOS. It won't cost you anything and it'll give you some indication of whether you can get at your data without resorting to recovery utilities.

Here are some links to the utilities that I mentioned:

NTFSDOS
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/fr.../NTFSDOS.shtml
NTFS for Windows 98
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/fr...tfswin98.shtml

PARAGON NTFS for Win 98
http://www.paragon-gmbh.com/

**Linus** · 09-15-2003, 01:21 PM

Found a deal for the same exact drive for like $90, so I went ahead and bought a second. First thing I'll do is ghost the current drive and work on the copy - if I lost this data I think I would consider suicide (briefly).

Originally Posted by bh76

We put the drive in a Windows 98 machine, booted it into DOS (command prompt only from the F8 boot menu), and used the freeware read-only version of NTFSDOS. Presto, it mounted the NTFS partitions and assigned them drive letters.

Thanks for the heads-up! I assumed that since the partition wasn't seen by the XP installation CD that it was unrecoverable. I'll definitely give NTFSDOS a shot once the ghost is complete - could save a ton of time and manual labor getting things restored.

**kmzpub** · 10-21-2005, 02:14 PM

Greetings,

Give a try to Active@ partition recovery tool. It works quite great and really helped me before to restore lost partitions. It's algorithm is simply breathtaking. Recommended! Really.
http://www.partition-recovery.com/