axon said:
There's no error message per se; I can see the drive in Windows explorer,
when select the drive I get an hourglass for a while, and then windows asks
if I want to format the drive. When I look at the disk properties with the
disk management tool in the Computer Management msc it shows the file system
as "Raw". This HD is from a laptop that had Windows XP Media Center as the
OS. It's a Gateway.
You could check and see if the partition table on the disk is visible.
This tool displays the four primary partition entries coming from sector 0
of the disk.
Download and unzip PTEDIT32.zip from here.
ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/tools/pq/utilities/
In this example, there are three defined partitions, and the fourth one is blank.
The menu at the top, selects which hard drive you're looking at. If the disk
isn't showing up in the menu, then maybe it isn't physically being detected.
If you write down the numbers and do the math, you'll get a rough idea of the
size of each partition, and you can compare that information to what you know
about what should be on the disk. (If you have no prior knowledge of what is
supposed to be on the disk, then you'll have no sanity check to apply.)
http://www.vistax64.com/attachments...n-partiton-recovery-dell-xps-420-dell-tbl.gif
If the partition table was damaged, you could use a tool like this. But
I don't recommend rushing off to use this, unless you know what you're
doing. What I mean by that, is this tool can write to the (potentially broken)
disk, making matters worse than they were originally. TestDisk can scan the
entire disk, looking for partitions, and by doing so, reconstruct the
partition table. But, at this point, we don't know enough about the nature
of the problem with the disk, to determine whether it is time to try this
or not. For example, it could be a driver problem with the SATA interface
you're using.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
Any time you attempt data recovery, your first priority is to try to make
a copy of the broken disk. That is in case there are any "accidents" while
you're working on it. It may be better to boot into a Linux LiveCD environment,
to make a sector by sector copy of the broken disk to a spare disk. Then, you
can be a bit more careless while working on it, knowing you have a backup that
can be restored at any time.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Damaged_Hard_Disk
To give an example, I was doing data recovery about 20 years ago, on another
operating system. The tool I was using, promised to copy a duplicate directory
structure, onto a broken directory structure. I had no backup copy of the disk
at the time. What happened was, the tool wrote the "broken" directory structure
over top of the "good" directory structure (with no warnings), dooming all of
the user data to be lost forever. The lesson I learned from that, is not to trust
the repair tools too much, and first make a copy of the disk before doing anything.
All I needed was one good lesson like that, to make me believe in backups.
Paul
