Hi,
I just managed to wreck a hard drive and would like to know if there is any way of getting it back.
Here's what happened.
Disk 1 : IBM 30 gig on IDE0 (master) with a lot of partitions.
Disk 2 : IBM 20 gig on IDE1 (slave) with one 20 gig partition.
I wanted to transfer both drives' content using Norton Ghost on :
Disk 3 : Seagate 60 gig
I hooked Disk 3 on IDE1 as slave and started transferring the partitions from Disk 1 to Disk 3. As it was being VERY slow, I checked the wires and saw that I forgot to disconnect Disk2. Surmising that there was a conflict (both drives 2 and 3 were slaves on IDE1), I stopped the procedure, shut down the machine, disconnected Disk2 and started again. This time there was no problem. Except that when I got to backing up Disk2, it displayed as a 20 gig UNFORMATTED disk. Ugh.
After fiddling around with a lot of recovery software to try to salvage what I thought was a mere erased MBR, I finally f***** it up with an utility called reco-cih, made for recovery after a CIH-type attack (which attacks the MBR). This piece of code found nothing better than creating a 8 giga FAT16 partition at the beginning of the drive, proudly telling me that it had "repaired" the drive.
After beating myself up for a few hours, I called in a friend who accessed the drive under Linux and recreated the partition as a single 20 gig FAT32 (what it was before).
Current situation :
1) Partition Magic tells me Disk 2 has a 20 gig logical partition, with 4 giga used space, and 4 giga free space. Riiiight. Windows sees a 8 gig partition, with 4 free/4used.
2) After that, the recovery software found a lot, although not all, of my old files, but as "lost files", ie files without any directory information. Which means I can only recover relatively small files (the drive was pretty fragmented when that happened). Moreover, the software is guessing the size and format of the files, which means that all the formats that are not recognised (ie everything except jpg, doc and few others) are marked as .zip.
3) It also displays a lot of files belonging to Disk1. Which means that the first cloning operation did not "just" mess up with Disk2's MBR, it also copied on this disk the content of Disk1 (which is why it was so damn slow). I seem to remember it wrote 50 to 100 megs before I stopped the bloody mess.
So what I would like to know is : after all this havoc, is there a chance that there is still a copy of the original F.A.T. somewhere on the disk (I remember there should be two identical copies) ? If yes, how to find it, recover it and make the drive understand that's what should be on it ?
Big thanks to anyone who can help me out,
Fred
I just managed to wreck a hard drive and would like to know if there is any way of getting it back.
Here's what happened.
Disk 1 : IBM 30 gig on IDE0 (master) with a lot of partitions.
Disk 2 : IBM 20 gig on IDE1 (slave) with one 20 gig partition.
I wanted to transfer both drives' content using Norton Ghost on :
Disk 3 : Seagate 60 gig
I hooked Disk 3 on IDE1 as slave and started transferring the partitions from Disk 1 to Disk 3. As it was being VERY slow, I checked the wires and saw that I forgot to disconnect Disk2. Surmising that there was a conflict (both drives 2 and 3 were slaves on IDE1), I stopped the procedure, shut down the machine, disconnected Disk2 and started again. This time there was no problem. Except that when I got to backing up Disk2, it displayed as a 20 gig UNFORMATTED disk. Ugh.
After fiddling around with a lot of recovery software to try to salvage what I thought was a mere erased MBR, I finally f***** it up with an utility called reco-cih, made for recovery after a CIH-type attack (which attacks the MBR). This piece of code found nothing better than creating a 8 giga FAT16 partition at the beginning of the drive, proudly telling me that it had "repaired" the drive.
After beating myself up for a few hours, I called in a friend who accessed the drive under Linux and recreated the partition as a single 20 gig FAT32 (what it was before).
Current situation :
1) Partition Magic tells me Disk 2 has a 20 gig logical partition, with 4 giga used space, and 4 giga free space. Riiiight. Windows sees a 8 gig partition, with 4 free/4used.
2) After that, the recovery software found a lot, although not all, of my old files, but as "lost files", ie files without any directory information. Which means I can only recover relatively small files (the drive was pretty fragmented when that happened). Moreover, the software is guessing the size and format of the files, which means that all the formats that are not recognised (ie everything except jpg, doc and few others) are marked as .zip.
3) It also displays a lot of files belonging to Disk1. Which means that the first cloning operation did not "just" mess up with Disk2's MBR, it also copied on this disk the content of Disk1 (which is why it was so damn slow). I seem to remember it wrote 50 to 100 megs before I stopped the bloody mess.
So what I would like to know is : after all this havoc, is there a chance that there is still a copy of the original F.A.T. somewhere on the disk (I remember there should be two identical copies) ? If yes, how to find it, recover it and make the drive understand that's what should be on it ?
Big thanks to anyone who can help me out,
Fred
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