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HDD reports non dos cant boot need data

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19 replies

by casemaker

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Hi,
I have a Gateway2000 Colorbook in my shop. The customer lost access to the hard drive. When it booted it said disk not found. He went and got another colorbook off Ebay for parts. I was able to take the two and get both of them working. It was a cmos battery and bios settings issue. Using the HDD that came with the second notebook I am able to boot into W95. When I put the problem HDD in using a W95A or B boot disk the disk is not found. When I run tuff test diagnostics and perform a nondestructive test I can hear and feel the drive spinning and the test completes with no errors. Using a fat 32 boot disk and doing fdisk and show partitions I am able to see the drive with partition 1 and partition 2. 1 is active and both are non dos. It reports 2047 mb and that is correct. Using laplink to try and transfer the data the disk is not found.

When I boot it reports non system disk or disk error, using a W95 boot disk it boots to the A: prompt but will not chand to C: prompt saysinvalid disk. It does not change to d,e,f,g,h,I etc. Will not chang to any other.

There is no cd rom with this notebook .
My primary goal is to gain access to this drive to get the data off.
Thanks

19 replies

by kuhlio

If you have a normal desktop PC that is working, you could pull the HDD out of the laptop, buy a converter for the interface, and hook it up as a slave drive and try extracting the data off the laptop HDD and onto the PC's.

by casemaker

Thank You! I am not sure if I would be able to find this adapter. The laptop is very old and out dated.

by casemaker

I contacted Steve Gibsons support and this is there reply

SpinRite is not a "file structure re-builder". It will not find and
recover data that's been lost due to a destroyed FAT or partition
table. SpinRite's claim to fame is the *preservation* of your drive's data
at the physical sector level, not at the file system level.

by thechas

Sounds to me like a "drive overlay" program was used on the drive, and is now lost or corrupt.

Check the drive mfgs. web site for what overlay software they may have used in the past, and see if they list any recovery techniques.

I don't remember right now if there are any hints in the "200ways to revive a dead hard drive" download for drive overlay programs.

I seem to remember a recovery tool on a link at www.fdisk.com/fdisk that might help in this situation.

You might also take a look at the utilities at www.drivermuseum.com

I think jargon also had a drive overlay recovery utility.

Chas

by casemaker

Thank You!!! This information guided me in the right direction. I found a source on the www to assist me along.

by o-o-o

Sounds like the disk may be NTFS or ext2fs filesystem or something. I think system commander or partition magic may be able to tell you what type of FS is on there. Try installing Win2k on the working laptop and see if it can read it.

Good luck!o-o-o

by william jay

This will not guaratee the recovery, but . . . failing Partition Magic and NT boot disks, boot with Linux, all it takes is two floppies, use Linux fdisk to change the partition type to FAT16 and reboot, if it fails to be read then do it again and change it to Fat32 and reboot. . cheers.

by william jay

Linux fdisk will tell you which "non-dos" type of partition is on there now, before changing anything, so you may get a different idea when you see it. If you need the disks, we have 'em too, request by email is appropriate.

by cindar

If all of the above fails to work one almost quarenteed soloution is to go to http://www.ontrack.com/datarecovery/ this company are experts in data recovery and are quick and reliable but i'm afraid it will cost you some cash for there services (or programs).

by casemaker

Thank You!
This is not an option, the customer will not let the drive off site. It has data very important to him.

by cindar

just one last thing on ontrack the company in my above answer. They will come out to you. They also have a service where they can do the data recovery online even if you cannot boot the system. You just need to be able to get on to a live net connection. And they may have software you can buy that will help you recover the data.

Thats it from me hope you get it sorted as i said this is a last resort cause if i remember correctly they are quite expensive.

by casemaker

This question is taking so long because I am not allowed to remove the drive from the customers residence. So when I have some time I go over and try. There was a disk compression utility I had to get through. I also am trying Laplink but ran into problems with it not staying connected through the LPT1. I will award points when I am able to finish this project. Thank you!!

by andy chuho

If you ever have a disk than seems fine (spinning), it means no crash. The problem must therefore be circuitry... i.e the disks circuit board has a bad/failed/shot component. To get access to disk, find a similar (esp. crashed disk) and carefully remove circuit board and mount to your disk. You will access the disk but it may have a few bad sectors. You may have it as secondary to transfer data to the primary.

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