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NT Partition Retrieve

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by dschlesak

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I have a client that had a problem with NT crash. When he went to recover he used the wrong Emergency Disk. What he tried to recover was an NT server with C, D, E, F, G, & H drives each being 2 GB and I being 6 GB. The recover disk was for an NT machine that was partitioned C at 2 GB and D at 14.3 GB with E being a CD.

When he completed the recovery process he was still unable to boot and that is where I came in.

When I booted from my Norton System Works CD, I was able to see drives C, D, and E with E actually being the F drive from the original NT 20 GB system.

Any suggestions as to how to recover the old partitions. I assume that the partition table was overwritten with the partition table from the 16 GB system.

One idea that I had was to take a 20 GB harddrive and install it configured with NT server and partitioned same as the old 20 GB system. Next create a recovery diskette and try to recover the old 20 GB system.

Any ideas or comments are welcome.

3 replies

by timwalsh

Since the intent here (I assume) is to attempt to recover the data, try one of these 4 routes first:

1. Attempt a recovery using the correct emergency recovery disk (if available).

2. If your partion table was overwritten, attempting to overwrite it again with anything other than the correct recovery disk will only make matters worse. If you don't have the correct (original) recovery disk, you can attempt to manually edit the partition table. To do this, you will need access to the NT 4 Server Resource Kit both for the documentation and the required utilities (mainly DiskProbe). There may be other low-level Disk Editors out there that may or may not work correctly with NT. I won't attempt to discuss the procedure here as thereare several chapters in the Resource Kit dealing with disk/file system troubleshooting and repair.
WARNING: This procedure is not for the novice! If done wrong, all data may become unrecoverable. If you haven't used a Disk editor before, your client may be better served by having him/her take/send the disk to a data recovery company, explaining the situation, and having them recover the data. This will cost some money. Whether or not it is worth it will be determined by the value of the data to your client.

3. If you have another available NT computer (doesn't have to be NT server unless some of the original partitions were fault tolerant - i.e. striped or mirrored, or extended volumes), install the unbootable drive in the secondNT box and attempt to recover data.

4. If you have a spare computer, but do have a spare drive large enough to load NT and move an recovered date from the unbootable drive. Once this copy of NT is running, also attempt to recover data from the unbootable drive.

While trying your idea might work, if your partition size information is off by just a few bytes, it will not work.

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