Critical data lost on HD, HELP!!!

[leguerri]

Hello,
I'm having a problem with a HD containing critical data. This HD has 2
partitions: C: and logical letter D:, and I'm running Windows 95 on that
machine.
I booted DOS (Windows 95, but no GUI), and ran FORMAT D:, knowing my
critical data is on C:. I checked 3 times I really typed "FORMAT D:" and
"... DATA IN DRIVE D WILL BE LOST, ARE YOU SURE?". I formatted D:, but
after, the D: is blank with all free space (that's OK), but the C: is
blank as well!!! However, I see the free space is the same as when the
data was visible, so it's not been formatted, but something seems corrupted.

I booted from floppy, same DOS version, and ran SCANDISK. It detected my
FATs were not the same, and took the "best" one. I ended up with a really
empty C: drive! (all free space, like blank). Fortunately, I have an UNDO
diskette, so I should be able to go back to the previous state.

Running FDISK shows both partitions OK.

Any way I can recover this data?

Thanks for your precious help...

Louis-Luc

 

[Svend Olaf Mikkelsen]

Hello,
I'm having a problem with a HD containing critical data. This HD has 2
partitions: C: and logical letter D:, and I'm running Windows 95 on that
machine.
I booted DOS (Windows 95, but no GUI), and ran FORMAT D:, knowing my
critical data is on C:. I checked 3 times I really typed "FORMAT D:" and
"... DATA IN DRIVE D WILL BE LOST, ARE YOU SURE?". I formatted D:, but
after, the D: is blank with all free space (that's OK), but the C: is
blank as well!!! However, I see the free space is the same as when the
data was visible, so it's not been formatted, but something seems corrupted.

I booted from floppy, same DOS version, and ran SCANDISK. It detected my
FATs were not the same, and took the "best" one. I ended up with a really
empty C: drive! (all free space, like blank). Fortunately, I have an UNDO
diskette, so I should be able to go back to the previous state.

Running FDISK shows both partitions OK.

Any way I can recover this data?

Thanks for your precious help...

Louis-Luc

It could be guessed that a user with this behavior also frequently run
Defrag, which will help if the FAT is lost.

I would not believe that Scandisk can do undo, until I have seen it.

To provide further information, you can download Findpart for DOS at

http://www.partitionsupport.com/utilities.htm

do:

findpart all fp.txt

and insert (not attach) the output here.

If Scandisk undo should be run, the disk should be copied sector by
sector to another disk first.

The preferred method in this case may be to hide the partitions from
boot to a floppy, insert the disk in a working Windows system, and
attempt to copy data using recovery programs.

 

[leguerri]

Thanks for all your advises. I barely could recover the data I need, but
was *very* lucky!
I quickly walked home from my work to fix this problem. I could undo
my SCANDISK repairs with
A:\> SCANDISK /UNDO A:

Then I tried to repair again, saying to *not* replace FAT 1 by FAT 2 although
SCANDISK suggests to do so. Then it finds all the data as "lost chains".
Doing an "undo" disk takes forever, so I aborted and did the UNDO again. I
took a chance by not making an UNDO disk, and recovering all the lost
chains. I knew my data was there, but not their original filenames. I hoped
it could recover the directories, and it did! Many directories were corrupted,
but the ones containing my data were good, except some large files (hopefully
there were few) were trunkated and sized at 65024 bytes. I was *lucky* because
many directories had dummy or corrupted directories, or were empty.

However, adding to that, SCANDISK seems to have a bug. When it detects errors
it often doesn't display the options you can choose from, so you have to
know them by heart and know how many times to hit <tab> to choose the one you
want. Very silly when working on a damaged disk structure. If you don't know
them by heart, you have to try each one, and choose to do an UNDO disk, and
do the UNDO afterwards, before trying the next option.

Is there a fix to make the options visible under SCANDISK? I noticed that
several times, especially when Windows doesn't shut properly, and SCANDISK
then finds errors. I always have to know how many TABs (0, 1 or 2...) to hit
to choose the option I want.

Thanks for your responses.

Louis-Luc