Help needed badly - HD corruption

[ck26]

Hi - yesterday my machine's second hard disk failed totally. I tried using
Partition Magic to reformat it and partition it etc. During the formatting
of the disk (it had reached 97% completed) it crashed with a write error and
dumped a large hex message. The problem is that now it seems that my other
hardrive - the one with the OSes on has now been corrupted in some way - its
not booting and is showing up as a blank, unformatted, unpartitioned drive!

I have taken the second hard drive out and tried the main hard drive by
itself. It still doesn't boot. I've deleted the slave entry at boot for the
2nd HD, but still nothing. I've transferred the boot hardrive drive over to
a Windows ME machine and hooked it up as a slave drive. It doesn't show up -
it's installed the hard drive driver, but no drive letter has appeared (or
rather, my old partitions haven't showed up).

What can I do? I've lost everything. I already lost the second hard drive
(physical damage), which was fine because it had no really important data on
it. But the boot hard disk is a different story - I had 3 OSes on it -
Mandrake 8.1, Windows 98SE and Windows 2000, which I'm sure you can
appreciate took years to really fine tune. Most of the important data has
been backed up - except for a month's worth of photographs I hadn't yet
saved onto CD, which are obviously important to me. I just don't know how
this could have happened. I'm really out of ideas now. Are there any
programs like jpeg dump for memorysticks that I could use to copy portions
of the raw HD over onto the Window ME's hard drive to try and salvage the
photos at least? (The corrupted boot hard disk is 60GB whereas the ME system
is only 40GB).

Thanks to anyone who can help me sort this horrible nightmare of a mess
out - I _do_ know how to start all over again, I really need help with
trying to recover those few files / fixing it so I can boot again without a
full reinstall. Maybe its the mbr that the Partition Magic error screwed? I
was using LILO to give me the OS menu - if I chose Windows it went to the
Windows multi-boot screen (e.g. Windows 2000 or Windows 98SE). LILO is a
linux boot loader for those of you whoo may not know.

Please help if you can! Thanks.

 

[Duddley DooRight]

That is what happens when you use partition magic.

These programs are junk.

Why dont you ask Partition Magic if they have a solution for this???

They may have an emergency recovery procedure.

Might try looking at www.ntfs.com

They have some utilities that rebuild partitions.

They may want some money.

Best I can think of.

I firmly beleive in using one and only one operating system.

 

[Phrederik]

Hi - yesterday my machine's second hard disk failed totally. I tried using
Partition Magic to reformat it and partition it etc. During the formatting
of the disk (it had reached 97% completed) it crashed with a write error and
dumped a large hex message. The problem is that now it seems that my other
hardrive - the one with the OSes on has now been corrupted in some way - its
not booting and is showing up as a blank, unformatted, unpartitioned

drive!

Silly question, but you are sure the second hard drive is the one that you
partitioned, right?

Just because a drive is C: does not make it the first drive.

Two things to remember. First, never leave drives connected when you are
formatting OTHER drives. Second, do not use third party utilities unless
ABSOLUTELY necessary. Why could you just use FDISK/FORMAT?

 

[ck26]

Silly question, but you are sure the second hard drive is the one that you

partitioned, right?

Yes, that's crossed my mind - but, yes, it was the right one - there was a
drop down list of hard drives and I picked the right one because it was only
40GB and not the 60GB boot drive.

Just because a drive is C: does not make it the first drive.
Agreed.

Two things to remember. First, never leave drives connected when you are
formatting OTHER drives.

Good idea. Will remember that one next time - its just that the PM program
was on the boot drive and I didn't consider potential problems like this -
after all why did the "formatting" of one drive mess up the boot sector of
the other drive?!

Second, do not use third party utilities unless
ABSOLUTELY necessary. Why could you just use FDISK/FORMAT?

PM has always worked for me, bad luck I guess on this occassion. Fdisk is
fine, but not as flexible and easy to use. As I say, PM is quite good
usually. I won't be using it again though, unless I've removed the other
drive first!

 

[ck26]

OK, I've now downloaded the PC Inspector File Recovery tool. It is saying I
have a problem with the boot sector of the drive - all the data seems to be
there still - its not being used at all, but I can't access it after a
certain cluster (before where the photos are unfortunately!) because of the
following error:

"Bad parameter in boot sector bytes per sector (57344) > 32768!"

Does anyone know how to correct the boot sector configuration? The above
tool has no way of correcting it built in as far as I can see.

Many thanks for the help so far.

 

[David Burnett]

Sounds like a controller problem. Unfortunatley you might not be able to
get your data back since you've tried to access the disks. Controllers are
fairly cheap, but I'd recommend a better one than you previously had since
it failed. Do a search for "HD controller" and you should find plenty of
information.

 

[Phrederik]

If it's JUST the boot sector, you might be able to get away with:

FDISK /MBR

....this should write a new master boot record on the disk.

 

[Cari]

I know its a little late in the day for this and I'll probably be flamed for
it but:

There is no substitute for a good backup! Ever.

We've probably all been the victims of lost data at some point in time.....
and all (hopefully) learned from our mistakes!

Cari
www.coribright.com
www.loyalangels.com