Re: Recovering dynamic hard disk

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From: Herb Martin (news_at_LearnQuick.com)
Date: 04/26/04


Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2004 04:37:25 -0500


<kaulam@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:5fe311b0.0404260023.6e6c5b45@posting.google.com...
> I tried posting this query on WinXP group but was advised to try on
> the servers group - so here goes:
>
> I have a large ATA disk with Win2003. I started mirroring it's boot
> partition (C: of about 8GB) on to another one (using MS Software
> RAID). However I shutdown the machine before the mirroring was even
> 10% complete.

Make sense they sent you here since XP doesn't support MS software
Mirroring.

> I lost the other disk (mirror target) & have not been able to boot
> with the original disk alone after that. System goes upto windows GUI
> but then resets again.

Have you tried "Safe mode".

> On connecting the disk to another system (booting Win2003 off a
> different disk), the Disk Manager showed this disk to be foreign and
> therefore I imported it. However the importing terminated with an
> error - and hence could not complete.

Sounds like this disk is corrupted/damaged too.

Is this REALLY the actual (original) C: drive? If you only had trouble
with the shadow (second) half of the mirror and no trouble reading it
on another system, I would suggest that it had never been formatted
as a BASIC disk -- to boot, a disk must "start life" formatted while it
is still a BASIC disk (it needs a partition table to boot.)

> The question now is how to recover the disk to it's original state or
> at least access the data on the disk.

Probably not. You might try Recovery Console and and it's boot
sector/master boot record repair tools.

You should make a DISK copy before doing anything (else) to the
disk, IF the data is truly important. (Of course if that were the case
you would just restore from backup.)

-- 
Herb Martin
>
> Thanks for any info you can provide,
> - A. Kaul.


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