master boot sector virus + dynamic drive overlay

[brujaja]

Well, I see (too late) that there is actually a Knowledge Base report warning
us not to use the fdisk /mbr command when you have a DDO; but yup, that's
what I did. Technically, it was the "fixboot" command from inside the
recovery console (with the XP disk inserted.) I also used the cfgboot
/disableredirect command at that time.

So now I have a non-booting 160-gig Seagate HD installed as a slave, which
my system sees as a 10-gig FAT12 drive. Aargh.

I know how to fix it if I want to wipe the drive, but I had a truly
ridiculous amount of important stuff stored on a non-booting partition.
Errr, I thought it would be safe there. I have pretty much salvaged the most
important things from the system partition.

Is there any way to access the second partition? Without the DDO, none of
the data recovery programs I've tried are seeing it. I've got the Seagate
disk from which I installed the DDO, but it locks up when I try to re-install
it. (and so would I!)

Thanks for your advice.

 

[Bill Blanton]

Well, I see (too late) that there is actually a Knowledge Base report warning
us not to use the fdisk /mbr command when you have a DDO; but yup, that's
what I did. Technically, it was the "fixboot" command from inside the
recovery console (with the XP disk inserted.)

Fixboot is not the same as fdisk /mbr. Unless you also ran fixmbr (which is
similar to fdisk /mbr) the DDO should still be intact. The DDO is loaded
from the booting drive.

I also used the cfgboot
/disableredirect command at that time.

So now I have a non-booting 160-gig Seagate HD installed as a slave, which
my system sees as a 10-gig FAT12 drive. Aargh.

Is that 10 GB or MB? Was the volume formatted as NTFS or FAT32?

I know how to fix it if I want to wipe the drive, but I had a truly
ridiculous amount of important stuff stored on a non-booting partition.
Errr, I thought it would be safe there. I have pretty much salvaged the most
important things from the system partition.

Is there any way to access the second partition? Without the DDO, none of
the data recovery programs I've tried are seeing it. I've got the Seagate
disk from which I installed the DDO, but it locks up when I try to re-install
it. (and so would I!)

Any error messages? It may be detecting that it is already installed. Any references
to the drive manager when the system first boots?

Can you see the full capacity of the drive in Windows disk management?

 

[smlunatick]

Fixboot is not the same as fdisk /mbr. Unless you also ran fixmbr (which is
similar to fdisk /mbr) the DDO should still be intact. The DDO is loaded
from the booting drive.



Is that 10 GB or MB? Was the volume formatted as NTFS or FAT32?



Any error messages? It may be detecting that it is already installed. Anyreferences
to the drive manager when the system first boots?

Can you see the full capacity of the drive in Windows disk management?

Any DDO loaded is used to "trick" a computer's BIOS that can not see
the larger drives. the BIOS is set to a 10GD hard drive setting. DDO
use has been "discontinued" from sometime since this the the exact
reason. During the DDO install, you should have been asked to create
a "recovery" floppy. Without this, you might be seriously out of lock.