ztech said:
I have a Seagate hard drive that was partitioned as follows:
C: NTFS approx 25 gb
D: Fat 32 approx 75 to 80 gb
Using Windows XP Proffessional, had service pack 2 on system
The problem I have is some time ago the fat table has become corrupted I
believe and now drive is no longer accessible thru internal or thru usb
enclosure.
I have 10,000 or more photos on this disk and have not been able to locate
any backup of fat table to restore so I can get access back to data on
hard
drive. The drive physically will spin up and is recognized in bios when
installed on internal drive ( desktop pc) but still unable to regain
access
to drive.
When booting up message of Command.com missng please insert boot disk.
Any thoughts, suggestions or recomendations would be greatly apprecated as
the photos on this drive are of family members who have recently passed
away
and can not be replaced.
XP Pro doesn't use command.com, and certainly not at boot.
I would suggest that you be very careful and not take any action until you
are sure of what you will do, and have the various components to hand.
In particular, you want to STOP using the problem drive, and not attach it
unless you are ready to recover data from it.
If you don't have the secondary system that's needed for this, you should be
able to find a responsible tech to help you with the method described below
for a reasonable price. (An alternate method is to get a new drive, set
the old one aside, install XP to the new drive, set up for recovery, attach
the old drive as secondary and then proceed).
Beyond that, data recovery houses should be able to get most or all of the
data back, and give it to you on DVD. They have specialised and expensive
hardware that can do an extremely good job of recovery.
They will generally give you estimates of what they think they can get back
and how much it will cost. Costs are based on amount of data and urgency
(faster service costs more). The lowest bill I have seen was just under
CDN$1000.
So, here is the general method:
Remove the drive and attach it to another XP system that has more than
enough drive space to contain recovered files. Sometimes it's most
reliable to attach to internal cabling rather than USB cases or adapters,
plus you will get better performance. Some recovery software has
difficulty with drives attached by USB.
If you attach the drive to a cable that has another drive on it, you may
have to play with the jumpers on both drives to get it recognised; for
simplicity you might disconnect the optical drive if it's the only thing on
the 2nd IDE channel and attach the drive to be recovered, there.
Ensure that System restore is not monitoring the drive to be recovered - you
must prevent anything from writing to it.
Install recovery software, and allow it to examine the disk. This can
take some time, and all you can do is be patient. Most recovery software
comes with a demo mode, so you can see what it thinks it can recover (and
possibly recover small files) before committing to purchase. I use
R-Studio, which is somewhere around $50. If the results look promising,
you can save the scanned list, pay the fee, enter the unlock code you get in
email, and just keep going.
Again, this can take time. Expect it to take hours, possibly a day or more
depending on the size of the drive. It isnt' exciting to watch. You
might want to try limiting the recovery to just a particular type of file
(for example *.jpg) to get a faster smaller and more specific result.
Once the recovery is complete, you can disconnect the drive, put the optical
disk back in place, and burn the recovered files to CD or DVD. Make sure
that the files can be opened on another system, and make more than one copy.
HTH
-pk
