Anyone know of software that can do data recovery on a drive that has/had an overlay on it? The story goes something like this.... I bought a 40GB Maxtor drive a year or two back to use for archiving junk I've downloaded over time. When I first installed it on my Abit BE6 v2, the board and/or Win98 refused to see the full size of it, even with attempting to manually set the cylinders etc in the BIOS. I came on AT Hardware, and unanimously was met with "use a drive overlay moron!". So, that I did. I'm pretty sure it was EZ-Drive, but it's been so long since I've even paid attention, I don't know anymore. Anyways, the drive hummed along fine for quite sometime, and the time came to upgrade my OS. I left the drive as FAT32 and reloaded my main drive (WD 20GB) with NTFS and Windows 2000 Server. The entire system has been just nifty for three weeks. Then, for NO reason that I can see, the Maxtor decided it didn't want to work. What I mean by this is:
- my Abit BIOS sees the drive just fine
- win2k says the drive is there in explorer, and even assigns the correct letter ( D: )
However, now when I click on drive D:, I'm greeted with "this drive is not formatted, would you like to format it now?". When I boot to a win98 boot disk and run FDISK, it tells me the drive IS formatted, but with a "Non-DOS" partition... which I'm assuming is coming from the fact that the thing had an overlay on it(?), instead of it saying FAT32 like it probably should. I've run a few programs on the drive thus far, and so far the results are dismal. LC Technology's RecoverNT says the drive is empty. I'm running Ontrack's Easy Recovery right now, it's 59% through and says it only found 2 files and 2 directories, which is WAY off considering the drive only had around four gigs free last time I checked.
Now, before anyone replies, two things:
1) Don't waste your time harping about backups. Yah, I should've made them, no, I didn't make any like 90% of the people reading this. Preach somewhere else.
2) I know retrieval is possible. There is no way every single sector was wiped off the drive and/or overwritten... I didn't swing a 200lb magnet by the drive, and it just stopped working mid-system use. Something likely happened to the FAT tables. I just don't want to pay $1000 to some clean room recovery place to get my data.
Whew, that was alot of typing.
- my Abit BIOS sees the drive just fine
- win2k says the drive is there in explorer, and even assigns the correct letter ( D: )
However, now when I click on drive D:, I'm greeted with "this drive is not formatted, would you like to format it now?". When I boot to a win98 boot disk and run FDISK, it tells me the drive IS formatted, but with a "Non-DOS" partition... which I'm assuming is coming from the fact that the thing had an overlay on it(?), instead of it saying FAT32 like it probably should. I've run a few programs on the drive thus far, and so far the results are dismal. LC Technology's RecoverNT says the drive is empty. I'm running Ontrack's Easy Recovery right now, it's 59% through and says it only found 2 files and 2 directories, which is WAY off considering the drive only had around four gigs free last time I checked.
Now, before anyone replies, two things:
1) Don't waste your time harping about backups. Yah, I should've made them, no, I didn't make any like 90% of the people reading this. Preach somewhere else.
2) I know retrieval is possible. There is no way every single sector was wiped off the drive and/or overwritten... I didn't swing a 200lb magnet by the drive, and it just stopped working mid-system use. Something likely happened to the FAT tables. I just don't want to pay $1000 to some clean room recovery place to get my data.
Whew, that was alot of typing.
