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A tale of woe that is NOT AS/400-related, but I thought I'd ask for advice, or at worst, sympathy here. I blew out a motherboard recently. Fried to the bone. Disk drives power up, but not even a Power-On System Test. So, I get a new motherboard and move everything over. Unfortunately, Windows 2000 is rather finicky about the hardware it's running on, and if your motherboard has a different chipset, chances are that Windows won't boot and you'll have to reinstall Windows and restore from backups. I didn't believe W2K could be so braindead, so I spent a day trying to rebuild the original system, but with the new drivers. In the process of trying to bring it up, I did a lot of drive swapping and dual booting (the joys of NTFS; don't get me started). I had the newly installed W2K drive on the system, as well two additional drives, one with my original W2K system (that I was trying to rebuild) and one with my mail data. Both were in NTFS format, and since I was booting from the other (third) drive, I thought they were safe. Anyway, during one of the Windows 98 boots, I got a cryptic message about "rebuilding" a part of one of my drives, and before I thought it through, I said "okay". BAD BAD BAD BAD move. Somehow, Win98 accessed the NTFS mail drive (which by all rights it should not have even been looking at, at least not during the boot) and seems to have done something particularly nasty. Whatever it did, it caused my drive to go from "NTFS" format to... "RAW". Ugh. This drive is now inaccessible by any means known to me, at least. I KNOW it didn't have the time to clear the drive, so I bet that my data is still out there. The question is, how much got wiped out? Could it just be one little spot on the disk that identifies the format type, and that could be patched? Can I rebuild it? What are the recovery options? Or, just respond with soothing thoughts and "tsk, tsk, poooor Joe". >grin<
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Joe, "The question is, how much got wiped out? Could it just be one little spot on the disk that identifies the format type, and that could be patched? Can I rebuild it? What are the recovery options?" More than likely only the "partition table" got messed up. What you need is a partition utility. I'd say there is a good chance that Partition Magic from PowerQuest could do this for you, but only a non-functioning "demo" can be downloaded free from their website at http://www.powerquest.com/partitionmagic/index.html although you can also purchase online and download for immediate use. You may first want to try href="http://www.users.intercom.com/~ranish/part/">Ranish Partition Manager which is free but I'm not sure what its capabilities are in terms of fixing already invalid partition data. Worth a try though. There are also lots of other parition managers out there, so you may want to do a web search to look for trials, etc. I'd say there is still a good chance the data will be recoverable, but be careful and make sure the docs say it knows about NTFS partitions. Let us know what happens! Doug -
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Power quest also has some other tool that might be closer to solving your problem... It might be this easyrestore. Or search around on their site. I have partition magic, but I think its just for building, changing, resizing, copying, moving different operating system partitions. TrevorComment
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My sympathies, Joe. It reminds me of the time my daughter was getting a kick out of generating static electricity by rubbing her feet on the carpet, then releasing it by touching the keylock on my PC. I never did get that machine to work again. I was baffled by your question. Maybe the folks at Microsoft can help: http://support.microsoft.com Nathan.Comment
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Trevor, "Power quest also has some other tool that might be closer to solving your problem..." Easyrestore won't help in Joe's situation. It is similar to the "system recovery" CD's used by many manufacturers. It is like restoring a ghost image to your hard drive to resest it to a clean install state. You still lose all user data on the drive, and you have to do the prep work *before* the problem occurs. Partition Magic does list "fix partition errors" among its features. I just don't guarantee it will help in this case since I don't know for sure what has happened to Joe's drive. But it is a *very slick* program to have in the toolbox anyway... DougComment
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The tool I was looking for is 'lost and found' which they referred to in their newsletter as saving data in these circumstances... Its been discontinued as a stand alone product. I'd call them and ask if there's a replacement. TrevorComment
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Hey Joe, I had a somewhat similar situation a couple of months ago. In my case, I was trying to run Windows from a secondary drive, and Linux from the primary drive. I could boot into Linux fine, and I could even mount the secondary drive as a share in Linux and see and access all my Windows data there. However, because Windows is a crappy design from the git-go, I could never boot into it. This is because Windows requires that it's OS remain in the primary partition. What a pain. Anyway, (thank God for backups), I formatted both drives, changed the jumpers and made the secondary (larger) drive the primary, and reloaded Windows on the master and Linux on the slave, and restored all my files. Works great now. If you load Linux on one of your drives, and boot into that, I'm betting that you will have complete access to all of your files on your Windows hard drive. Give me a call if you want the details.Comment
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Okay, Shannon, I'll give that a shot. I'm not as comfortable in Linux as I am in Windows, but I think I can muddle my way through. I'll pop the drive onto my Linux machine and see what shows up. The only problem is, this is an NTFS drive. How would Linux know about NTFS formats? Do I have to do any special kind of mount command, or will Linux magically try to mount the drive at boot time? JoeComment
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Joe Pluta wrote: Okay, Shannon, I'll give that a shot. I'm not as comfortable in Linux as I am in Windows, but I think I can muddle my way through. I'll pop the drive onto my Linux machine and see what shows up. The only problem is, this is an NTFS drive. How would Linux know about NTFS formats? Do I have to do any special kind of mount command, or will Linux magically try to mount the drive at boot time? Joe
You lost me right after "Okay, Shannon, I'll give that a shot."...
Although, as I understand it, Linux doesn't care what "other" formats your data is in, if it can physically find the drive (or virtually find the drive), then it can mount it. At that point it's up to you to figure out what to do with it. However, I'm still learning my way around Linux at the moment and I don't have the absolute answer to your NTFS question. Before you get started, check out the following links. The answer to your question most likely can be found in one of these places: Beginners Linux Guide Learn Lots.com Linux FAQ Linux Gurus (the best source for hardware related issues) Linux HOW TO Index HTH
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Joe Pluta asked: What are the recovery options? FORMAT C: In all seriousness, your W2K internals were set for a specific chip set when installed. There is no easy reset, and this is buried pretty far and deep. Your best, and IMO fastest option is to start from scratch. DaveComment
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Joe, Commiserations. That is one of the reasons I work on AS/400 and not PC - the OS is slightly more predictable. By the way, David, Shouldn't that be FDISK instead of FORMAT? russellComment
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I don't think so, , , , the stated problem was due to a change of motherboard. All of Windows is now confused, and should be reinstalled from scratch. The setting of disk partitions should remain unaffected. DaveComment
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Joe, You have my sympathies
As I understand NTFS (I may be wrong cuz' I'm certainly not an NT or Win2K expert) it handles boot partitions and file allocation tables (FAT) differently than either DOS, Win31 or Win9x. Their layouts are quite different. Its not like FAT16, FAT32, etc. Your statement that you received a message about a "rebuilding" indicates that your NTFS partition is probably toast. Usually, by the time a message is written to the screen, the hardware command for the drive controller has already executed and started doing its thing. A scan of the MS knowledgebases to see if any *similar* problem with NTFS can be solved (via commercial packages) is probably your only hope. Good Luck Terry
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