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Can't Access Drive (Partition) !!!!!

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by kahunanui

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Ok, we submitted then withdrew and now we are resubmitting this question again! [We thought we figured it out]. I've never come across this situation before.

Scenario: Workstation used to dual-boot W95-B (OSR-2) and NT4. Used FAT32NT driver inNT and set up a data (NTFS) partition for NT and a FAT32 data partition for W95. Stupidly updated the FAT32NT driver(s) (don't update or upgrade when things work). Everything APPEARED to be fine and life was good...until the next day when we booted the system we got CHKFAT32 dialogue stating the drive was being checked. Then we saw the drive light (LED) stay on for a long time. The partition being worked on was the FAT32 partition which is around 18 Gigs w/ about 10 Gigs of data.
We thought it was doing a surface test. However, upon rebooting, we see that the drive (partition) LABEL is missing, and we are unable to access the drive/partition. We were afraid that our data was toast because we rebooted to the Win95 side and the partition was not accessible there either. Then we tried Partition Magic which also stated that the drive was "unformatted". Surprisingly, when we booted into DOS 7 "Safe Mode Command Prompt Only", BINGO, the data was there!!!!???? Now the questions are how do we recover the data without losing the long file names?! Why can we access the data in DOS 7 but not in either W95 or NT and ...if PQMagic reports the drive as "unformatted" why are we able to access it in DOS?! We do have a SCSI DDS3 tapedrive and CDRW to use to backup but I cannot think how in DOS to do that. Rather could we use
the "XCOPY32" command but I seem to recall that only works in a DOS BOX. Does anyone know of what we could do? We thought of using "Lost & Found" which allows you to restore the LFNs but have had mixed results using that utility.

Any help would be a cherished blessing! Thank you!

9 replies

by digital_dna

Looks like you have yourself one hell of a problem... I'm kind of curious to see what suggestions you get.

If you don't need the data (which I'm sure you do) I'd try FDISK /MBR and SYS C: to get the disk to boot... Of course I'd only do this on a disk I didn't need the data off (educational experiment)!

I'd probably also try tossing in another drive, set it to master, install Win98 on the new drive, put the other disk in as a slave and see what happens..

Good luck!
EBCDIC

by kahunanui

Yeah, we've never seen anything like this. We've already tried running it as slave to a number of OS's. No way any of 'em see it. We did find out we had performed a clone of the drive and it was only a few weeks old so we were able to save what files were newer (minus the LFNs - as the usually good utility DOSLFNBK didn't work - there were too many errors on the drive like bootsect size and cluster etc...) We ended up with what appears to be 100% data recovery but if it weren't for being somehow able to access the darn partition in DOS, we would have lost all the data since the clone. Weird !! We were even able to restore almost all of the LFNs!

by techie401

I would recommend that you create an image of at least that partition if not the whole drive using Power Quest Drive Image or Symantec Ghost. This way you can at least get back to where you are. At best you will be able to recover your data. Bothof these programs come with a way to look inside an image and extract desired data. If this works you will have your long file names as well.
The other thing which you could try is to put the HDD from the system and set it up as a slave drive on another system. That way you would have a second local drive to copy files to in dos.
I am not sure as to why you would be able to see the files in DOS 7, but maybe this will end up saving you. If I think of anything else I will post again, or if you have any more details post them. Hope this helps.

by kahunanui

Unable to do that because no matter which copy/imaging program we tried we received too many errors for it to continue. Most didn't even want to read the drive at all. But as mentioned above, thanks to a clone of the drive before it all happened, and somehow being able to read the drive in DOS, we were able to restore it. Whew!

by fred07

ouch, DOS is basic until XP. as you can boot to dos I would believe your MBR is corrupted. Now my brain is old and memory is poor but some Dos guru can fill you in as it starts " scandisk ?: /r /f /? " and that is probably not the correct sequencebut what you will be doing is a scandisk and repair with an auto fix sys in there and I do NOT remember the exact as I have not used it in years.
Also there is a dos command for the cdrw for the whole shebang.
If you get it back do yourself a favor and do a cdrw backup of all and update it often.
I wish you well and hope you get it back.

by kahunanui

I agree that it must have been something to do with the MBR. And of course, we haven't backed that up as well. We will be doing extensive work on that drive, believe me. I used to be able to work with Debug and such, but its been so long I didn't want to chance it. Its probably a good thing I didn't try, because we were lucky on this one. Thank you very much for your concern!

by rcom

Before trying anything else, the first thing you should do is follow the suggestion on getting a complete copy of the drive. This is the most important thing to do. Use Ghost, EZ drive or whatever to do that. I'd use another hard drive to copy the data to. That way if something happens you can quickly make another copy of the drive to use for troubleshooting. If you use backup or xcopy there's too much that needs to be done if you want to start over.

If the driver reset the boot file that may be the issue. Run the setup disks for NT and see if you can run repair on that. You may need to edit the boot.ini file to re-establish the dual boot settings. There amy be an issue with the drive size as well. There's a bunch of Microsoft articles that explain the dual boot process and size considerations for NT.

I don't think any of the data is lost and if so there's plenty of solutions for recovering the data. One I use is called R-Studio and it works easy. But you'll need another computer with windows installed to use it. There's a demo version that can be used to test with.

www.r-tt.com

DOS doesn't have an active partition to boot from and that's why the drive won't boot to Win95. When you boot to the command prompt the files are viewable just as if it was a secondary drive.

By the way DOS 7 is the version that comes with Win95.

by kahunanui

We tried with no luck (see above) using all kinds of copy/imaging programs. We tried almost all. As far as NT repair or "boot.ini", that wasn't the issue. The entire partition was pretty well "pooched". But yes, being able to access it in DOS 7 wasthe blessing. You were right in the data wasn't lost, but we are fairly sure even if we were able to get it back we would have lost all the LFNs.

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