Extended partition failure..... 1

[Hobe]

I had a 40G slave hard drive partitioned into 2, the active partition being 10G and the other being 30G. This HD was connected through the ATA 66 cables.

The other day I was surfing around and downloading when suddenly my PC crashed, there wasn't much that I could do so I reset the machine. I was then waiting for WIN XP Pro to reboot but it never did and kept reseting itself having flashed the blue screen.

After some distress and experimenting I found that booting up with ordinary IDE cables worked but was incredibly slow. I noticed that windows was trying to access my slave HD and that it made a quiet buzzing sound every 2 seconds.

Windows detects the extended partition but can't read its name and thinks it is unformatted. I tried using Partiton Magic 8 to see what was wrong but it came up with some CRC error. I also found some software online called Active Partition recovery which boots from DOS. This programme could read the information on the extended partition so I know its still there....

Is there anything I can do to retrieve the data?
PLEASE HELP ME...

 

[wolluf]

Sounds like you need data recovery software. Its not obvious from your description if the drive is damaged - or just the filestore/partition table (is it fat32 or ntfs, btw?).

Might be worth downloading drive manufacturer's diagnostic utility (most have one on their website) - to check status of drive. Also - you could try booting into recovery console (

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307654).

If it can see slave drive, try running chkdsk on it from there.

Here are a few data recovery tools recommended by others on tek tips:

Free:

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm

(probably no good if ntfs filestore).

Commercial:

http://www.webattack.com/get/filescavenger.html

http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm

Google will find you many others.

 

[Hobe]

Thanx, I'll try this

 

[Hobe]

Oh, forgot to mention that the HD is NTFS.