Windows XP Lost My 2nd Hard Drive

[Ryan]

Hi,

I posted a question about this before, but I am going to start over as
I have more info.

My PC (running Windows XP Home) has two hard drives. One is drive C,
the other is Drive M. C is a 20 gig drive and M is a 40 dig drive.
Both worked great.

Last week, I turned off my PC using XP shutdown as always. I came back
the next morning and booted up my machine and all seemed well until I
tried to access a file that was stored on M. Windows XP told me the
drive was "not accessable"! It then offered to format it for me and I
said no.

I thought the drive was dead, but I have downloaded a trial copy of
FinalDate Premium and IT can see the drive AND all the files and
folders on it as if nothing happened. I could even preview the files.
However, Windows XP claims the drive isn't formatted.

I went into XP "Disk Management" and it shows both drives and their
proper size. However, there is nothing under "format" for the missing
drive M while C is shown as "NTFS". Of course, drive M WAS NTFS also
but XP doesn't seem to know what anymore.

How do I get XP to start reading this drive again? Is there software
someone can recommend that can correc this problem? Is there a way to
tell Disk Management to format of a drive?

I know my data is not lost and the drive runs, I want to get XP to use
the drive again without loosing that data.

Any ideas? I am cluless as to what happened.

 

[Eric Gisin]

Windows 2K/XP will read parts of the volume (fat,mft,etc) at startup, and if
it encounters a bad sector the volume will not be accessable.

What does chkdsk (without /f) say when run from CMD? If it is not easily
fixable, you need to copy the files to another drive, using data recovery
utility like findntfs.

 

[Jan van Wijk]

Hi Ryan,

I thought the drive was dead, but I have downloaded a trial copy of
FinalDate Premium and IT can see the drive AND all the files and
folders on it as if nothing happened. I could even preview the files.
However, Windows XP claims the drive isn't formatted.

I went into XP "Disk Management" and it shows both drives and their
proper size. However, there is nothing under "format" for the missing
drive M while C is shown as "NTFS". Of course, drive M WAS NTFS also
but XP doesn't seem to know what anymore.

Most likely the bootsector for that partition has been overwritten by
something.
This sector is a popular target for bugs (and viri) because it is
located at sector-number 0.

How do I get XP to start reading this drive again? Is there software
someone can recommend that can correc this problem? Is there a way to
tell Disk Management to format of a drive?

Yes, but that is DESTRUCTIVE. You do NOT want to do that
since it would wipe out many existing filestructures ...

I know my data is not lost and the drive runs, I want to get XP to use
the drive again without loosing that data.

You need to re-create that bootsector, and actually there is almost
certainly a SPARE-bootsector available at the end of the partition.

You can recover using that spare-bootsector using my DFSee tool
by selecting the partition, forcing NTFS-mode and the use the
"fixboot" command. (see DFSNTFS.TXT and DFSHOWTO.TXT)

If you need assistance, contact: support AT dfsee DOT com

Any ideas? I am cluless as to what happened.

Bootsector damaged ...


Regards, JvW

 

[Ryan]

Well, I am SO frustrated and have run several pieces of software on
this machine this weekend only to come up with the following:

1. The drive is working.
2. All of the data IS there in all of it's folders.
3. Several utilties (including the one mentioned above) tell me the
MBR is FINE on the drive, no boot record problems.
4. Windows XP Home still swears the drive is there, yet "not
accessible"!!

If I go to properites, it claimes the drive has "0 used" and "0
freespace".

How on Earth do I get Windows XP to use this drive again and look at
those darn files??!!!!

HELP!

 

[Jan van Wijk]

How on Earth do I get Windows XP to use this drive again and look at
those darn files??!!!!

Repair the BOOTSECTOR!

From your descriptions, it is NOT the MBR that is damaged but the
partition bootsector.

Regards, JvW

 

[Ryan]

Repair the BOOTSECTOR!

Well, I have run several programs, all tell me:

"Primary and backup booksector OK" on this drive and if I try and
restore the backup anyway, it won't do it because it claims nothing is
wrong with this drive.

I read elsewhere on groups about XP having permissions for drives and
maybe that is messed up. Does that make any since at all? I am at
wits ends over this! Pefectly ok drive according to diagnostics,
windows claims it is not accessible suddenly.

 

[Eric Gisin]

As I said, bad sectors have the same effect. Did you check for them?

 

[OverKlocker]

Well, I have run several programs, all tell me:

"Primary and backup booksector OK" on this drive and if I try and
restore the backup anyway, it won't do it because it claims nothing is
wrong with this drive.

I read elsewhere on groups about XP having permissions for drives and
maybe that is messed up. Does that make any since at all? I am at
wits ends over this! Pefectly ok drive according to diagnostics,
windows claims it is not accessible suddenly.

i had something similar happen to me... i booted to my winxp cd, went
to the drive letter in question, ran chkdsk, and all was good ( i
might have ran another one or 2 of the other utilities on the winxp cd
first, but chkdsk was the one that fixed it

 

[Markeau]

I had a similar problem - a partition was inaccessible ... I used
Partition Magic to Undelete the partition which fixed it.

 

[Zvi Netiv]

Well, I have run several programs, all tell me:

"Primary and backup booksector OK" on this drive and if I try and
restore the backup anyway, it won't do it because it claims nothing is
wrong with this drive.

Boot sectors are OK doesn't mean that they are also correct and that they
reflect the correct partition / drive geometry and file system structure! The
boot sector contains data known as BPB (BIOS parameters block) that describes
the partition properties such as the size of the cluster (in sector number), the
number of sectors in the partition, the location of the MFT (for NTFS), the name
of the file to look for to start loading the OS (NTLDR in NTFS' case), etc.
Apparently, something changed in your boot sector BPB, and what's worse, the
backup boot sector for THAT particular BPB matches the erroneous boot sector.

If this is what happened then boot sector diagnostics will tell that the sectors
are OK, but the OS won't be able to read the partition because the BPB does not
match the actual layout of the file system areas and the OS will assume that the
partition is not formatted.

If my above assumption is correct then there is a chance that the backup of the
original boot sector still exists and it could be recovered and restored.
RESQDISK from the RESQ utilities could be instrumental here. From
www.resq.co.il/resq.php

Regards, Zvi