Unable to assign drive letter

[Guest]

Hello, all.

Had a hard disk problem last night, and am now unable to boot from that disk.

So, after attempting several other recovery options, I successfully
installed WinXP on a new HD and then installed the problematic one as a
secondary disk, so that I can get its data off.

This seemed to be a successful operation, however the second disk does not
reflect a drive letter, so I am unable to get to the data therein.

I have run compmgmt.msc--disk management tool. The second disk shows up as
two partitions: one small FAT [status: Healthy (EISA Configuration)] and a
large NTFS [Healthy (Active)]. However, the Disk Management tool will not
allow me to assign a drive letter to the NTFS partition, so I can't get to
the data via Windows Explorer, et al.

In case it helps, when I booted directly from the WinXP CD to try the
Recovery tool, I was able to traverse a large portion of the folder/directory
tree, which gives me some hope that the problematic HD isn't experienceing a
hardware problem. All the files appear to be there...thankfully.

Is the inability to assign a drive letter related to the fact that the drive
was a MBR volume? In any case, is there a way I have been unable to discover
to assign a drive letter to such a drive?

Or, if there are any other suggestions about how to recover the data from
the unbootable HD, I would appreciate the heads up.

Thanks in advance,

Ed

 

[DL]

Bootdisk.com has some utilities that can run from floppy that 'may' help
recover.
You might as a last resort try the disk checking utility, available from the
faulty hd manu site, they can sometimes repair a hd sufficiently to recover
data

 

[Guest]

Hello everyone,

Well, after a weekend and a day of fret and research, I now realize that I
did not fully and adequately describe the situation that led to my problem.
I am posting this follow up with the hope that it will help someone else who
runs into this problem for the same reason. Depending on how long these are
postings are archived (and searchable), of course...

As it turns out, the most important fact that I neglected to mention was
that my PC had been running Symantec's Norton GoBack when it locked up and
was turned off. After discovering that Symantec has several kb articles that
describe my problem exactly [Doc IDs:2003102412571858 & 2003102213162958]
and solution [boot with Win98 boot disk and then run "gb_prog.exe /u"], I was
still unable to get my HD to boot. Maybe because I'd already run chkdsk/f
from the WinXP boot CD, which found and corrected errors before I found the
Symantec info. I don't know if this is relevant, but am including it for
completeness' sake.

So, here's what finally allowed me to get to the data: As it turns out,
GoBack applies a special type (0x44) to the disk partition that it manages
and, while Windows will recognize this as a valid partition, it will not
attempt to mount it as a valid drive letter.

Thanks to Google, which led me to
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Storage/Q_20854798.html, I learned of a
PowerQuest (now Symantec!!!) utility called ptedit [you can download it from
Symantec Doc ID:2004063693751462]. After booting from a Win98 boot floppy,
ptedit allowed me to change the partition type from 0x44 to 0x07
(OS/2-IFS/HPFS and NTFS) and turn off the 'bootable' flag [0x08 to 0x00]. I
don't know if that last step was required, but it made the
unbootable/unaccessible HD the same config as my third (heretofore
unaffected) HD, so it seemed safe enough.

I now have access to all of my 'lost' data; Windows XP automatically mounts
the drive to a drive letter when it boots.

Thanks to everyone who responded to my plea for help.

Ed

Hello, all.

Had a hard disk problem last night, and am now unable to boot from that disk.

snip

 

[Harry]

have you imported the disk using disk management tool. i think you will have
to first import it before u can assign any letter to the drive. if that
isn't possible try using professional recovery tools like easy recovery to
get ur data back

Harjeet