Recovering an orphan disk drive

[Jacky Luk]

Hi,
I messed up my partitions by myself with System commander 8.. one of the
drives became orphan without drive letters, without resorting to system
commander 8 itself, I am not sure how to recover that drive. Are there any
free or built-in utilites that can safely recover that drive? (my harddisks
are huge (some 160G + 160G + 100G ), so if I take a full backup, it will
take lots of double-layered DVDs and a lot of time... I'm not sure about
fdisk and diskpart and I'm scared I would destroy other valuable information
in other drives. so please help...
Thanks
Jack

 

[R. McCarty]

Orphaned how ? - Does XP's Disk Management still see the drive &
show it as Basic and display it's partitioning ? System Commander, is
that a Vcomm product ? - Have you checked the program to see if
it has an "Undo" provision to back out whatever change you applied.
420 Gigabytes is a lot of storage - Are the drives backed up, so if
worst comes to worse you can recover your data. You might check
VComm's website and see if they have a forum where you can ask
for more product specific help.
I use a program called "Active Partition Recovery". It works very
well, but from your description I can't say whether it would help you
out.
Active Recovery product info here:
http://www.partition-recovery.com/partition.htm

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

Hi,
I messed up my partitions by myself with System commander 8.. one of the
drives became orphan without drive letters, without resorting to system
commander 8 itself, I am not sure how to recover that drive. Are there any
free or built-in utilites that can safely recover that drive? (my harddisks
are huge (some 160G + 160G + 100G ), so if I take a full backup, it will
take lots of double-layered DVDs and a lot of time... I'm not sure about
fdisk and diskpart and I'm scared I would destroy other valuable information
in other drives. so please help...
Thanks
Jack

What's an "orphan disk drive"? How does it show up in
Explorer? What does the Disk Manager (diskmgmt.msc)
say about it?

It appears that you like to skate on thin ice. First you play
with System Commander, without bothering to back up your
important files. Next you intend to use tools such as fdisk or
diskpart, again without backing up your "valuable information"
(your words).

Sooner or later you will realise that all important computer
files must be backed up regularly, and especially before a
major operation. Seeing that hard disks are cheap and that
they can easily be installed inside an external USB case, it is
difficult to see why you work the way you do.

 

[Jacky Luk]

Yes, orphaned (sorry for my bad english)
I sort of shuffled the partitions, I expanded an old partition and it
overwrote some NTFS information on the next partition. And the operation was
interrupted, I can still see the information when I used the Repair CD, but
when returning to Windows XP, the partition disappeared! No joking...
Thanks
Jack

 

[Harry Ohrn]

I am not aware of any freeware products that can repair your system once
you've changed the partition structure the way you reported. FDISK and
Diskpart can repartition for you but all data on the drive will be destroyed
during the process.
If you are worried about data on other drives you should disconnect them
before messing around too much. I thought System Commander 8 had a tool for
fixing your problem. Why don't you contact the support services for this
product and see if they can help you?
http://www.v-com.com/product/System_Commander_Home.html