crash during defragmentation: drive and partition lost

[Harald ARNOLD]

I have a big problem.

After running defragmentation on a WinXP NTFS harddisk
I had to recognize that the logical drive was lost. In
partition table I only see sensless beginning and stop
sector parameters.

On this hard disk I have (had) ALL photos and pictures
of my 11 month child :-((((

I tried recovery with StellarInfo.com. This programm
will find the logical drive and I see the list of files
with correct sizes in a list. But when doing recovery
to another disk ALL files get file size 0 :-(((

I didn't change ANYTHING on original crashed disk.

How can I recover those files of my baby doll ?

Thanks Harald

 

[H264BitPacker]

I had a somewhat similar problem last week. Because of the failure of
a memory module, my disk got corrupted. The presence of the disk in
the system would prevent Windows XP from booting. I bought a new disk,
reinstalled XP and tried to use my original disk as a slave. That did
not help. I could not boot the system!

The next thing I tried is to put the old disk inside a Linux box with
NTFS kernel support. I was able to boot the Linux machine and mount
the 'bad' disk. I am now in the process of recovering all my files.

I realize you might not have a Linux box on hand and might not be able
to build a Linux kernel. I just wanted to pass my experience to
others.

Good luck.

 

[Harald ARNOLD]

Am Wed, 16 Nov 2005 16:51:59 -0800 schrieb H264BitPacker:

The next thing I tried is to put the old disk inside a Linux box with
NTFS kernel support. I was able to boot the Linux machine and mount
the 'bad' disk. I am now in the process of recovering all my files.

I specially installed a SuSE linux kernel with NTFS support, had a
second hard disk of the same typ, made an dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
for only working on backup system hard disk.

I know the parameters for the lost partition in sectors (start/end).
But I think that fdisk will also clear the partition, when removing
the now wrong partition entries and adding a new partition with correct
parameters.

When doing this test and starting with XP Windows told me: unformatted
hdd, should I make a format on this disk.

What can I do else ?

 

[Harald ARNOLD]

Am Thu, 17 Nov 2005 14:07:47 +0100 schrieb Harald ARNOLD:

Am Wed, 16 Nov 2005 16:51:59 -0800 schrieb H264BitPacker:

I look via linux via myself C-programmes onto partition table,
extension partition, tried to recover it via Win or Linux
tools and last but not least I tried it by may self to look
at blocks/sectors at hard disk - data is realy lost - no
chains no block ids, no folder ids, lost

OK! It is not so but - we have burned some VCDs so someting
is here.

The failure ?

- Win XP by itself
- How can a defragmentation tool write to a partiotion table ?
- Failure on mainboard ?
- Failure on SATA controller ?
- Failure on HDD ?

We will never know ?

But I have to say that only linux tools take me the way to
recognize that any further work will not help ---

Thanks for your help, Harald

PS: But I have my baby in my flat - there is nothing lost !