Recovering existing data from Dynamic Unreadable HDD

[DJ]

Hi all

I have a problem getting Win2000 Pro to be able to read a HDD which has, for
some reason, become unrecognizable.
The symptoms are that Windows Explorer shows the drive as being "Local Disk
(D". ie It's there but it doesn't show its original volume label. Clicking
on it produces "D:\ is not accessible. The parameter is incorrect". Disk
Management describes the drive as being "Dynamic Unreadable" and doesn't
display any info about its contents.

The drive is a data disk (not the boot disk) and has an NTFS format. It
hasn't been partitioned at any times so I'm not sure what caused the
problem.

I've done a disk scan using iRecover (Trial version), which revealed that
all of the original directories are still intact. It also revealed that
there is an NTFS partition occupying the entire disk, with a zero-length
FAT16 partition at the end. The bad news is that when iRecover gave me the
opportunity to recover the data, I was only allowed to select a single
directory and it doesn't (appear to) include sub-directories. Since it takes
about an hour to run iRecover would be a bit tedious to recover everything
this way.

Can anyone recommend a method to solve this problem without having to pay
for something that teases innocent people!!??

TIA

DJ

 

[Doug Allen [MSFT]]

When did this start happening DJ? Are there any other Dynamic disks in the
system? Is this disk a member of any sort of RAID set?

 

[Guest]

You might try Knoppix. It is a bootable disk that will
open a windows explore like display. It will allow to
access all information on the disk and copy it to a new
location. You might give it a try.
David

 

[DJ]

Hi Doug

No there are no other dynamic disks. Nor is it part of a RAID set. It's
simply an everyday local drive set up as a slave device.

The only thing I can think of is when I swapped a couple of slave drives by
moving ribbon cables. Since then I have tried moving HDD/cdrom cables and
switching jumper pins around to no avail.

The diagnostic utility (Lifeguard) from the Western Digital site reveal no
errors. It shows the Drive #, Model #, Serial # and Capacity. Unlike the
other local drives though, it doesn't show the File system, used space and
free space. Seems very much like an OS/Format problem rather than a HDD
problem.

I have been to hell and back with this one! Surely there must be an easy way
to get the data back using built-in OS features or otherwise by a freely
available utility. No?

TIA,

DJ

Doug Allen [MSFT] wrote in message ...

 

[DJ]

Hi David

I had a look at the site. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be oriented
towards Windows and so I'm a bit apprehensive about going down that path.

I'm still looking for a way to recover existing files without having to pay
through the nose to someone who has re-invented the wheel...

DJ

(e-mail address removed) wrote in message