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Journal HunterZ's Journal: Disk recovery tools 6

Journal by HunterZ on Monday October 10, 2005 @04:06PM

My roommate has a hard drive with that suddenly started reporting itself as empty. My guess is that the partition table got corrupted, so I've searched for some tools to try to fix the problem with:

http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/DiskPatch.htm
http://www.atl-datarecovery.com/software.htm
http://www.ptdd.com/download.htm

I also recently used a DOS-based utility that was like FDISK on crack, but I can't remember the name. It was text-based, and the text was in color. Oh well.

I should also mention that I already tried Partition Magic and Norton Ghost on it. Strangely, PM couldn't read the disk while Ghost could. We don't have 250GB of spare space on another hard drive to try copying the data to with Ghost, unfortunately, and Ghost doesn't seem able to do anything else for us (such as letting us view the files on the disk or edit the partition table).

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Re: Empty hard drive (Score:2)

by unitron ( 5733 ) writes:

Does the motherboard recognize the full size of the drive or is it running some sort of Disk Drive Overlay software such as On-Track or EZ-drive?
- Re: Empty hard drive (Score:2)
  
  by HunterZ ( 20035 ) writes:
  
  Thanks for the reply!
  
  There's no way I'd let a DDO get within a hundred miles of any hard drive unless it was the only way to get it working.
  
  The problem was that the partition table got corrupted somehow. The disk was being recognized and was reporting an NTFS partition, but Windows couldn't access it.
  
  I ran DiskPatcher and it was able to regenerate the partition table and get things working again.
  - Re: Empty hard drive (Score:2)
    
    by unitron ( 5733 ) writes:
    
    I've noticed that XP and Partition Magic 4 (booted from a win98 floppy) disagree about which is the "C" drive and which is the "D". I figure XP is the more likely liar.
    - Re: Empty hard drive (Score:2)
      
      by HunterZ ( 20035 ) writes:
      
      My guess is that Partition Magic is assigning drive letters according to DOS logic, where the types and locations of partitions and drives determine the drive letters. In Windows XP, on the other hand, the user can arbitrarily assign drive letters (with NTFS partitions at least).
      
      Speaking of Partition Magic, it wasn't able to do anything with my roommate's drive when it was damaged. It behaved the same as WinXP: reported an empty but inaccessible NTFS partition.
      
      Norton Ghost was able to read the partition, bu
      - Re: Empty hard drive (Score:2)
        
        by unitron ( 5733 ) writes:
        
        Who makes DiskPatcher? I googled for it both as one word and as two and didn't get any results that look like what I wanted.
        
        Re: Empty hard drive (Score:2)
        
        by HunterZ ( 20035 ) writes:
        
        Sorry, the name is DiskPatch, not DiskPatcher. It's the first link in my original post.

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