HELP! - Lost my hdd partitions

[Linus]

Okay, I'm trying not to freak out here, with only mild success.

I was just playing around with the manual hard drive settings in the BIOS of my desktop PC, trying to get things to boot quicker. I think I set it on CHS (?) and kept the numbers (heads, cylinders, etc.) the same as they had appeared after an auto-detect. I rebooted, and instead of loading up the operating system it reported my 160GB drive as 136GB and rebooted with no interaction from me. So I changed the settings back, and windows still wouldn't boot. Odd. Booted to my WinXP CD, and it claims there are NO PARTITIONS on my drive. I immediately powered down and unplugged the drive.

I have a LOT of stuff on this drive that's very important to me. Many years of old emails, a huge collection of music and movies - irreplaceable stuff. I would be willing to pay damn near any price to get this stuff back.

So what are my options? If there's anything I can do with a very low chance of making things worse, I'd be willing to try it. I'm sure there are lots of data recovery services out there that would LOVE to take my money...anyone have notably good experiences with a particular outfit? Naturally, I'm looking for the cheapest way to get all my data back in one piece.

Any help would be most appreciated. I'm dyin' here.


Linus

[David Prahl]

I can't offer any help, Linus, but I thought I'd help by keeping this thread near the top of the stack. :wink:

[DimensionZero]

Hmm... I've never known a bad HD setting could wipe it out...
Does your BIOS have an autodetect option? Maybe try that, and see if it picks it up on it's own...

Perhaps take it to a friend's and see if their computer finds anything.. If not, you can at least run some kind of data recovery software on it.

onTrack Software (http://www.ontrack.com/) has a few software packages you can try.. There's a free version which I think actaully works..

I can't remember any others at the moment, but I'm sure a quick search on Google for datarecovery software will return some other options.

Good luck!

[Linus]

David Prahl - Thanks! Your goodwill is appreciated. :-)

DimensionZero - Autodect is what I reverted the settings to after it wouldn't boot to windows. Now the drive is autodetected just fine, but the XP boot CD can't see any partitions.

After some searching on other forums and the web, I've found a ton of different software paclages that should be able to recover everything - for a price. Even better, I have a friend with a copy of R-Studio (http://www.r-tt.com/RStudio.shtml), which should do the trick. Now I just need to get my hands on 160GB of storage space to copy the drive to (using HD Copy (http://www.miray.de/download/sat.hdclone.html)?) before doing anything that may write data, overwriting what's already there. I'll probably buy another 160GB drive and return it when I'm done, minus 15% restocking fee.

Thanks for the help.

[Bruno Figueiredo]

Get a startup disk and run fdisk. See if the main partition is active. If not, activate it.

Place it as a slave in another computer and try to get your stuff. If necessary get ontrack's easyrecovery.

In last case, get it to a data recovery shop and expect to pay up to $5000 depending on the state of the disk and the amount of data to recover.

You really should have backups of importante stuff. :|

[JvanEkris]

Is it perhaps a idea to duplicate the HD with ghost, before starting to modify things..........

Jaap

[Janak Parekh]

Get a startup disk and run fdisk. See if the main partition is active. If not, activate it.
The problem is that no partitions appear, I think. Jaap, I don't think Ghost will do squat as it needs partitions to appear.

Linus, you switched a "sector translation mode". That is very very very bad -- it sounds like the partition table is corrupted. :( The good news is that the data is probably there, but you'll need, at the minimum, a software repair tool... or a service like OnTrack or DriveSavers.

--janak

[Steven Cedrone]

or a service like OnTrack or DriveSavers.

But you are going to pay some serious change to get that data back...

Hopefully Janaks' first suggestion will work... :wink:

Steve

[Linus]

I tried it in another machine, and again, the XP boot CD didn't see any partitions. However, someone on another forum suggested I try loading up NTFSDOS - apparently he's had the same problem and NTFSDOS has seen everything just fine (so he could copy file to another drive and reformat).

I found the exact same model drive on the web for cheap, so I ordered one. The plan when it gets here is to first do a sector-by-sector copy (using whatever software will do it - Ghost, R-Studio (http://www.r-tt.com/RStudio.shtml), or HD-Copy (http://www.miray.de/download/sat.hdclone.html)) and put the original drive in a corner in case I eventually have to send it in for ($$$) data recovery. Try NTFSDOS on the new drive. If that doesn't work, R-Studio should do the trick. If that doesn't work, suck it up and send it in.

Let this be a lesson to all of you: back up often and ghost before "playing" with the BIOS.

[Janak Parekh]

Let this be a lesson to all of you: back up often and ghost before "playing" with the BIOS.
Good luck. A corollary of your lesson is that everyone loses data at least once. Believe me, I've trashed HDs a few times years ago by messing up the BIOS. Today's BIOSes are actually much more user-friendly than the old ones were, especially when you had to specify the geometry of hard drives manually.

(OT: Does anyone remember the original IBM ATs, where you had to memorize the Hard Drive Type # or look it up elsewhere? The original ATs had 15 types, the last 286s had 47 types. And, since you couldn't specify custom geometries, you had to use Disk Manager?)

--janak

[maximus]

Try NTFSDOS on the new drive. If that doesn't work, R-Studio should do the trick. If that doesn't work, suck it up and send it in.


When running NTFSDOS, make sure you uncheck the 'partition setting' box. Checking the partition setting will create a new partition on your HDD, and since it is currently seen as empty HDD, the new partition will overwrite (again) your deleted partition. Good luck !

(OT: Does anyone remember the original IBM ATs, where you had to memorize the Hard Drive Type # or look it up elsewhere? The original ATs had 15 types, the last 286s had 47 types. And, since you couldn't specify custom geometries, you had to use Disk Manager?)


Yeah, that was a pain. Autodetecting BIOS are on top of my 'Positive Technology Advancement' list.

[Linus]

Update: Got the new hard drive in, got my friend's copy of R-Studio. NTFSDOS didn't find any partitions, so I booted up windows from a third drive and ran R-Studio. It found all the files on the drive, I restored them to the new 160GB drive, and I'm back in business. Anyone wanna buy a 160GB 8MB cache 7200rpm HDD from Maxtor?

Hopefully that was a close enough call to get me to backup every now and again. :) Thanks for the help, everyone!