Need Help with Recovery of drive important!

[Aryan_abx]

Hi guys, I have a problem which i really hope somone can help me with.

I have built my second computer. The system is 110% stable.

Before i finished building my computer, i had a spare storage hard drive on my old pc. I backed up everything onto that drive last night without any problems.

Once finished with my new pc, i decided to put the storage hard drive into my new pc and get the backed up information. It didnt go to plan!

The hard drive which is a 80gb Diamondmax Ultra ATA 133, 8mb Cache, wouldnt come up in windows. It was displayed in the bios and bootup screen.
I went to computer management, too see if it was just 'off' or needed importing. This also wasnt an option. The drive said, Unreadable.

I tried doing a fixmbr from the recovery console, that made no difference. I moved the hard drive back into my old computer and the same problem has arisen. I am unsure how to get chkdsk to work because it hasnt got a specified drive name...c: d: etc.
After then returning back to my new pc, i checked computer management and it displays the drive as foriegn disk?? Which was strange enough, but when i tried to import i just recieved error messages saying this cannot be done.

I really hope somone can help me, i had alot of important work on that drive. Can't believe something relativly simple as this can go so wrong.

Regards,

Aryan

[rjs735]

You didn't specify the OSs for old and new. We can guess the new sys is xp or xp pro or w2k but Old no idea.

[Aryan_abx]

Sorry apolagies, both systems same XP pro with sp2 and full updates.

[Aryan_abx]

Also my new system specs:

Athlon 64 FX-53 | GA-K8NSNXP | ATI X800XT PE | 1GB Mushkin PC3500 CL2 | Audigy 2 ZS | GigaWorks™ S750 | Diamond Pro 930SB BK

Older system:

P4 2.6, 1gb Mushkin pc2700 CL2, Audigy 2 Platinum, 9800XT, Asus P4G8X.

Both with XP pro, sp2 and updates.

[rjs735]

Also unclear about spare drive on old system. was it drive "d". On new system did you install as drive c or d?

Basically just a guess you are caught in the xp/pro lock and integrity problem of who owns the hd ( old sys vs new sys).My belief is that MS in their infinite wisdom doesn't want anyone creating a second copy of the os on a hd and installing it in a new system without going thru the std bs of being authorized by MS.

I think you've compounded the problem by trying to do an fdisk under the recovery console of the new system so now the old system won't recognize it.

It may have been better to network the two systems and then move the backup data to the new system. Then do an install of the hd on the new system .

In my case just trying to install a new 3rd hd cause me to have to call ms and get authorized again. In my case just a nuisance.

Sorry so far just told you why but not how to fix. At the point your at you might try another attempt at recovery console on the old sys and try an fdisk there. If not then I think you maybe out of luck.

The only other idea I would have is to get a utility like acronis or ghost or Partition magic and see what they see.

Foreign disk usually means the drive is not readable as fat or as ntfs. I usually see it if it was on linux box or any non dos partition.

[Aryan_abx]

Well i named it drive x:, this drive never had any OS installed on it, It was simply a dynamic drive for backup and anything else that wasnt program running related.

I moved it to my new system and it never ran, it doesnt have a drive letter asigned to it because i havent got access to it. When i tried to put it back in the other system to see if i could at least get the data on my old system. The same problem regarding the hard drive came up.

[rjs735]

Ok. Are both systems running the same file format. example is the old system running a fat file system and the new system running ntfs file system. This would explain why when you ran fixmbr on the new sys against the spare drive that when you moved it back to the old system the old system doesn't recognize it.

Was the old system upgraded from win98se to xp pro or did you do a fresh install from scratch.

To determine if the bios detects the spare drive run fdisk. It will tell you all the hds attached to your system. Then by selecting the appropriate drive fdisk will tell you the file format of the drive. Now when you know the drive address from fdisk. You should be able to run chkdsk against this address. Don't expect too much from chkdsk. because the system coudn't find the drive chkdsk may have problems with the drive as well.

As rule fixmbr is used to fix master boot record problems.

You may have to face the reality that you need a hd utility program to recovery the data on this hd.

[swannema]

install the harddrive in one of the systems and use Knoppix and try to access it that way.
Knoppix is a Linux distro that runs completely off a cd. If you get lucky you can access the files and burn it on a disk or move it to a different harddrive

http://www.knoppix.net/

[Aryan_abx]

Managed to get access to the hard drive, i used a program here:

www.runtime.org

Nice program and it retrieved all the data i could have lost, recommend this to anyone else with similar problems.

[rjs735]

Thnks for the software pointer. I am glad we steered you in the right direction. I am happy you were able to recover the data.

Were you able to tell why the drive went south from the utility?

[Aryan_abx]

The software was good. It spent about 1 hour scanning my drive and locating the files stored on it.

Once that was done, i was able to copy the data i wanted (not just the entire hd), to another Hard drive.

After this i simply changed the disk to a basic disk and formatted via windows. I havent had any problems with it since.

This problems seems to be quite well known however. If you take a look at this link, you will notice that it seems a common problem. Also written far better than i would write it .

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Oper..._21072024.html

Quote:

TOPICAL LIST MS ARTICLES ABOUT NTFS "ISSUES"
---------------------------------------------------------

Dynamic disks
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"When you view your system disk or boot disk in the Disk Management tool, it may be listed as "dynamic unreadable", and you may be unable to use the Disk Management tool to manage this disk. Note that this behavior may occur even though the operating system is currently running from your system disk or boot disk. Your original dynamic system disk or boot disk may now be listed as "Missing" - "Offline", and all volumes contained on the missing disk are noted as "failed" and are not accessible. If you then try to reactivate the missing disk, you may receive the following error message:"

"The specified disk could not be located."

"This problem can occur if Windows 2000 was re-installed and during Setup a volume on the dynamic disk was deleted and recreated"

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;236086

(NOTE: This also applies to basic disks too, but MS won't admit it; it is not a dynamic-only problem.

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I hope anyone else with similar problems can make use of similar programs.

[Brain_abx]

It might have corrupted the file system thats why you are not able to access your hard drive from your second computer. Use data recovery software to recover your data.

[Brain_abx]

There are plenty of data recovery software availabel online.

Search with the keyword Hard drive data recovery on google.

[Bofinn]

If you don't have a backup routine in place, I'd recommend buying a USB external hard drive and Acronis True Image...

[3 of 7]

Wow, talk about bringing a post back from the dead.....
This is another reason to not use dynamic drives......
I've never had anyone explain to my satisfaction why on earth you would use one instead of a basic one.....