Re: Recovering an NTFS drive
- From: Poldie <Poldie@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 30 Sep 2007 11:06:52 -0700
On Sep 30, 5:14 pm, "Schrodinger" <n...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
"Poldie" <Pol...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1191164069.316398.205220@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I'm asking here 'cos I've seen other techies post here.
I booted from my XP SP2 CD to try and perform scandisk on a drive. (I
couldn't defrag it because there was some problem or other which
Windows suggested I run scandisk to fix). The PC loaded up the
drivers etc, but then the PC rebooted. Great. Even better, now, my
other 300gb drive is showing as "not initialized" and "unallocated" in
the Computer Management tool. This has happened before, and I fixed
it by initializing it, then running some freeware app to recover
files, which it sort of did, although it couldn't get everything back,
but it was mostly ok. I have no idea why this happens. It doesn't
seem to be something which I can find references to on the net. My
PC is ok apart from this, and I have no idea why it happens. I have
two physical drives. One is partitioned as C: and D:, which are fine,
and the other is F:.
So my questions are:
1) Why does this happen?
2) Which app do you recommend I use to recover the data?
3) Is there a way of simply `initializing` the drive and have it
rebuild the various structures it needs to see the data which is
manifestly still perfectly intact on the drive?
Cheers!
I went through a stage a while back of every SATA drive suffering from
hal.dll errors regularly and this on several set ups. Touch would hasn't
happened for ages. Never got to the bottom of it. I think certain
combinations of motherboard and chipset, processor, drivers, bios etc. cause
problems with certain drives.
I have found after many tries with different software that Active Undelete
does the job most times. It takes a while to scan a disc, but the results
are reliable and it seems able to get pretty much anything that's there.
www.active-undelete.com
I'm not aware of an answer to 3), although maybe somebody else can provide
one.
The easiest answer of all? Get hold of Acronis True Image and a spare hard
drive large enough to take all of your data. Once a week, plug the spare
drive in to a spare SATA or PATA cable and back the whole thing up as a
drive image over night.
If anything goes wrong, simply plug the other drive in and start backing up
onto the first drive(s).
It's so much easier than faffing about trying to figure stuff out.
I used to use Ghost to do a clean install (ie restore) of a ready-to-
go dev environment, but that was in Win98 days when disks were
smaller! They're a lot cheaper now, though, so I might continue the
practice. I'll be using sata/usb, though, with external drives, so I
can disconnect them whenever I have to do any disk housekeeping with
Windows. I quite like the idea of having Windows as a safely
contained virtual machine under Linux, though. Currently I need both
W2k and XP environments and don't need two boxes lying around the
whole time.
Another advantage of using Ghost is that you don't go through hell
restoring thousands of tiny mp3/jpg files, having an error on the copy
(which just terminates the copy) and having to try and pin down
exactly which file has failed to copy and try and copy the rest.
Wouldn't it be better if Explorer just copied all the files which it
can and just give you a report of the failures at the end?
.
- References:
- OT: Recovering an NTFS drive
- From: Poldie
- Re: Recovering an NTFS drive
- From: Schrodinger
- OT: Recovering an NTFS drive
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