Unreadable dynamic disk HELP!!!!!

[CablingPro]

hi,

I'm running Win XP, SP1. The system is comprised of 3 drives: 1 4Gb SCSI ( basic partition) and 2 100 Gb IDE (dynamic volumes), all formated with NTFS. Recently i wanted to backup my system using Norton Ghost 2003. I made an image/copy of my system partition (SCSI drive) and saved it onto one of my IDE hard drives. To test it i replaced the SCSI drive with other, older SCSI drive, booted from ghost disk and attempted to restore my system partition from the backup image located on one of my IDE drives. Tried it twice and it failed each time. I gave up and wanted to boot my system and keep going. After the first boot everything seemed to have worked OK, but right after the second system restart i could access none of my IDE drives. As soon as i clicked on one of them from Windows explorer i get message saying "The Disk in drive X is not formatted" and Disk management says: unreadable and the option available is to covert to basic, which equals the loss of all data on the disk. Microsoft says that Unreadable status usually results from corruption or I/O errors on part of the disk, rather than failure of the entire disk. You can rescan the disks or reboot the computer to see if the disk status changes, which obviously didn't work for me
Is there any third party tools i could use to recover from my situation or am i realy f!@#$% and lost almost 180 Gb worth of data?

thanks a lot in advance

k

 

[CablingPro]

no replies huh? that's OK.

I was right, Norton Ghost 2003puts some kind os signature of every disk it handles possibly altering partition table. Check this out, when i boot off of a Ghost disk I'm able to browse through the contents of all "unreadable" disks. What i'm going to do is to create a new image of one of the inaccessible drives and save it onto a new 120 Gb BASIC disk, then put that drive into a system with Ghost installed and see if i can dump the image or at least use ghost explorer to extract files selectively.
I'll let you know if that works.

k