Win 2000 killed my partition!!!!

[UcLaGeE]

Help! I am in desparate need of help... I'm not sure what exactly happened, but all I know is after I rebooted in Win2k one time, it wouldn't boot up anymore... no big deal, I had a ME dual boot setup so I tried to go in there, that kinda froze up a little (my ME is very unstable, was like that a long time ago too, I always used 2k, so I didn't care)... so now I'm starting to get worried... Anyways, after a few more attempts of messing around with ME, I corrupt that I guess (right after it starts loading, it will go straight to the "it is safe to shut down your comp" screen, even in safe mode!!! how strange)... So I try to use Win2k emergency repair (off the CD) but I don't have an emergency disk and it's not able to recover it from the HD by itself... so now this sucks as it's not a big deal for me to reinstall, but I'd like to be able to extract my data out of the HD.... basically, it was a 30gb drive (was one 30gb fat32 partition).... now as i reinstalled win2k on my other drive for temp use only, it detects the corrupted drive as a regular FAT drive and only 10MB!!??!?!?!?! Win2k recognizes it as the 30gb drive, but the only partition it can read is 10MB!!! As I said I dont really care if my Win2k is messed up and I have to start over, but the main thing I would like to know is there a way to recover my data... nothing reallllllllllllly important, but basically all my email from the last few years, bookmarks, etc. so I'm gonna hold off formatting for awhile to see if anyone can help my predicament! Was this a virus'd attack (I was too lazy to install an anti-virus, sigh)???? For awhile when i attempted to boot, it would give me the message "AERead Status : 0000BBBB Failed to write signature to boot partition" or something close to that.... PLEASE HELP!

Thanks,
Anthony

 

[yazz]

UcLaGeE,

dont do anything rash right now.... i know how to fix this problem. it happened to me about 3 or 4 weeks ago. DO NOT FORMAT THAT HARDDRIVE OR FDISK IT YET. you will not have to reinstall the OS on that 30gig with the 10mb partition. JUST DONT FORMAT!!! you have to hexadecimcally edit the first sector of your harddrive. you can do this with a program called DISKEDIT.EXE. it is on the win2k CDROM. this utility is a part of the resource kit on the CDROM of win2k. what you do is install the resource kit onto your harddrive that is good.
DO THIS:
1.) remove the harddrive with the bad partition.
2.) install windows 2000 on another harddrive
3.) install the resource kit located on the windows 2000 CDROM.
4.) install the harddrive having problems.
5.) go to the Logical Disk manager under Computer Management within Administrative tools.
6.) find your harddrive under Disk manager it may take a LONG while for it to pop up, but it will eventually. Now go ahead and delete that 10MB partition. (dont be afraid)
7.) now you will see your entire harddrive as unallocated space or healthy partition.
8.) go ahead and close the Logical Disk Manager.
9.) Open up the Program called DISKEDIT.EXE
Now do not do anything till i repost with rest of the answer.
those are the only steps i can tell you right now, because i left my win2k manual (1500pages) at work. I need to read the manual because i forgot exactly what values you have to edit/change when hexadecimcally editing the first sector of the harddrive.

So just stay cool and calm and you will see the ultimate win2k hack ever and you will get your data back and your system will boot again.
i will post the rest of this in about two (2) hours (when i get to work).

 

[josphstalinator]

ive had this happen to me, i was dual booting winMe and win2k as well. but i had a ghost image of my disk and i was up and running in 6 minutes, woohoo!!

i strongly suggest taking a few minutes to check out norton ghost or adobe go back. ive never used the adobe program but i hear its the same.

 

[yazz]

okay, i am back, at work and with my book.

i have one correction. do not use DISKEDIT.exe, instead you have to use DISKPROBE.exe.

so first open DISKPROBE
2.) from the menu select DRIVES and then PHYSICAL DRIVE. the Open Physical Drive window will open.
3.) select the drive you want to edit.
4.) Deselect the READ ONLY flag for the Handle assigned to the drive.
5.) Click SET ACTIVE to assign the handle to the physical drive. then click OK to save settings and close the window
6.) from the menu select SECTORS and then READ. The Read Sectors window will open
7.) now leave the settings at their default (Starting Sector=0, Number of Sectors=1) and click Read. The window will close and the Main DiskProbe window will show the context of the MBR (Master Boot Record).
8.) now look on the right side of the application and you will see the byte at offset 01C0. now if you go over to the third value from 01C0 you will be at byte offset 01C2. the value maybe at either 42, 47 or some other value. change this value to 0C
here is a table of values for hex editing the MBR record:
01=FAT12
04=FAT16
05=Extended Partition
06=BIGDOS FAT
07=NTFS
0B=FAT32 < 512MB
0C=FAT32 >=512MB
9.) next select SECTORS and then the WRITE option. The Write Sector window opens to identify the drive to which you're writing and the starting sector of the write. since you only read only sector you will only write one sector.
10.) Click Write It. then say YES.
11.) close the window and exit the program. this will release the lock on the sector.
12.) now Restart Windows 2000. once you restarted go into Disk Management and you should see your drive totally restored. i would at this point to a deep scandisk of the drive that fouled up.
i recovered my system's D: drive which was a 13gig drive with tons of mp3s. would have been a pain to restore all those mp3s from CDs filled with mp3s.