Re: Dynamic Disk Woes - help me recover my data!

Tech-Archive recommends: Repair Windows Errors & Optimize Windows Performance

From: D.Currie (dmbcurrie.nospam_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 11/02/04 

Date: Tue, 2 Nov 2004 11:25:02 -0700

"Simon" <Simon@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:FCF490CE-E881-4551-A40A-CDAEFFFA2CEA@microsoft.com...
> Okay. I'm trying to fix a friend's laptop. it had 2 OS installs on it -
> one
> Red Hat Fedora on 8GB, and one XP on 10GB, and was booting with the Grub
> boot
> loader. XP was completely unusable, it was so screwed up with malware.
>
> I booted to an XP Pro CD, and formatted the foreign disk (the Redhat
> install
> partition) and put a fresh install there. I loaded up some antivirus
> software, spybot, and some other utilities, and started to import data
> from
> her old XP install. In particular, I know she was eager to recover all of
> her
> digital photography. Anyway, after some time, I have copied over all
> relevant
> data, and my new install remained uncompromised by the nasty virusses and
> malware that infested the original installation.
>
> So, I went into Disk Management, and I deleted the C: Partition (my
> install
> was showing up as D:\Windows), set the D: partition as active, and I kept
> in
> my back of my mind the fact that I would need to modify the boot.ini to
> reflect the change. Before I did that, however, I decided to convert the
> disk
> to Dynamic so that I could span the now unformatted space where her old
> install resided.
>
> The idea was that I'd avoid doing another install and copying the
> recovered
> data back again.
>
> Well, I got a message about unmounting the file system, and rebooting, but
> I
> don't think it gave me the option to NOT proceed at that point. It said
> that
> it would complete the disk conversion after the reboot. Of course, because
> I
> hadn't yet modified the Boot.ini, this didn't happen... it couldn't boot.
>
> I tried to use the XP CD to repair... and without really thinking about
> what
> I was doing, I went into recovery mode and used the fixmbr command... I
> had
> no idea how bad that would be.
>
> Anyway, I've since reloaded XP Pro to the space inhabitted originally by
> my
> friend's BAD install. In Disk Management, I see the whole disk as Dynamic
> Unreadable, and don't even see the partition I am booting in to. The only
> option I'm given here is to Convert to Basic Disk, which will delete the
> data
> I'm still intent on recovering.
>
> I've been reading KB articles, and I don't quite understand what I need to
> do to resolve this. The disk never finished converting to Dynamic, so does
> this mean that I need to edit the boot sector to remove the 0x42 entry
> that
> I'll find when I run dmdiag -v? Or will need I need to modify whatever is
> there to be 0x42? The articles I've read attempt to explain the situation
> I
> guess, but I'm not understanding it. I don't feel confident making any
> change
> that low level without some confirmation.
>
> Anyone around that knows a lot about this sort of thing that can give me
> some insight? It would be greatly appreciated!!!

Take the drive out, put it in a working computer, salvage the data, then
delete the partitions and start over. Anything you do at this point is
likely to make it all worse than it is now, considering how well it's gone
so far.

On the other hand, you say that you reloaded XP to where it was originally,
so you might have already lost the data that was there, depending on how you
"reloaded."

Relevant Pages

  • Re: boot sector f*ed
    ... "I updated the machine and it doesn't boot anymore". ... Please capture the output from running fdisk and bsdlabel on the problem disk ... Soft updates is a technique employed by the filesystem to ensure that the file ... application to install the 64bit FBSD with flashplugin on the portable ...
    (freebsd-questions)
  • Re: Boot Problem
    ... Was either disk set up as a Microsoft dynamic disk? ... Do not change the boot sector signature. ... I ensure all OK by swapping over drives. ... installing XP as it insisted there was no drive to install itself on! ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
  • Re: Windows Xp crash
    ... Message came up "Disk Boot failure.: ... indicated that all drives had no disk inserted. ... I tried about a week ago to install Windows 7 on the second hard ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
  • Re: A Disk Read Error Occured. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart
    ... can boot and recover data. ... > to install it as a slave and buy some kind of 3rd party software to try to ... >> reformat can lock out bad sectors, if the disk is going bad, chances are ... >> That way if you ever have to reinstall the OS, ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.mediacenter)
  • Re: Recovery from hard drive failure
    ... Boot off the rescue CD ... Install grub in the boot partition ... since I'm not setting up the new hard drives exactly the way that the old ... the few days it will take me to get myself organized to recover. ...
    (Debian-User)