computer components & hardware - Broken partition

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Broken partition – Help me Svend please!

The story so far …

The Dell laptop has 1 3 Gb hard drive with 2 partitions
Partition 1 had Win 95 9about 1.2Gb in size)
Partition has/had win2000 (1803Mb in size)
I need the data files on partition 2

The system was booting on partition 2 (win2000)
One day it got ntldr is missing
After much tinkering the system now will boot Redhat linux 8 on
partition 1 only. Partition 2 is not really available.

Some of the gory details about the tinkering
The dir command worked successfully on the second partition to start
with
Chkdsk was run and the dir command produced unreadable characters for
the files listed
There was a period when the second partition could not even be seen,
the system also wouldn't even boot off a floppy!

There don't appear to be any hardware errors on the disk
The first partition was deleted and recreated using linux's fdisk
The dir command then worked on the second partition but there were
still unreadable characters
Eventually linux was installed on the first partition
Findpart was run, here is the output:

Findpart, version 4.36.
Copyright Svend Olaf Mikkelsen, 2003.

Searches for partitions type 01, 04, 06, 07, 0B, 0C, 0E, 82, 83,
plus Fdisk F6 and Lilo sectors. Information based on bootsectors
is marked B. If the disk is larger than supported by BIOS, the
supported part of the disk is examined. Disks are numbered from 1.

OS: DOS 8.00

Disk: 1 Cylinders: 788 Heads: 128 Sectors: 63 MB: 3103

-PCyl N ID -----Rel -----Num ---MB -Start CHS- --End CHS-- BS CHS
0 - 83 63 201537 98 0 1 1 24 127 63 B5 3 OK
0 - 83 725760 1935360 945 90 0 1 329 127 63 B0 3 OK
330 1 06 63 3693249 1803 330 1 1 787 127 63 NB OK
330 - 0B 63 3693249 1803 330 1 1 787 127 63 B OK
330 - 0B 63 65280 31 330 1 1 338 13 12 BU OK

-----FAT CHS -Size Cl --Root -Good -Rep. Maybe --Bad YYMMDD DataMB
330 1 33 226 32* 512 195 0 27 4 16

Partitions according to partition tables on first harddisk:

-PCyl N ID -----Rel -----Num ---MB -Start CHS- --End CHS-- BS CHS
0 1*83 63 201537 98 0 1 1 24 127 63 OK 3 OK
0 2 05 2661120 3693312 1803 330 0 1 787 127 63 OK
0 3 82 201600 524160 255 25 0 1 89 127 63 OK
0 4 83 725760 1935360 945 90 0 1 329 127 63 OK 3 OK

330 1 06 63 3693249 1803 330 1 1 787 127 63 NB OK

Partition 1 is my /boot, partition 3 is my swap, partition 4 is / (all
for linux). I assume 2 is the extended partition and the 1 at 330 is
the original second partition from which I need to retrieve data.

I am only concerned about retrieving some data on the second
partition. Once the data has been retrieved, the disk will be
reformatted and the system rebuilt. The first partition can be trashed
if it will help retrieve the data from the second partition.

Is there any hope or has there been too much tinkering?

Thankyou in advance
David

(Svend Olaf Mikkelsen) wrote in message ...
On 1 Aug 2003 12:19:33 -0700, (David Tsang)
wrote:

Chsdir, version 1.9.

Disk 1 CHS: 788/128/63 FAT Location: 330/1/33

Total clusters: 460926 Cluster KB: 4
Last used cluster: 460752 Reserved: 32
FAT sectors: 3601 Root cluster: 4744
FAT used clusters: 361688 FAT entries: 17806
Used clusters: 361688 Entries: 17806
Directories: 1052 Directories MB: 5
Files: 16754 Files MB: 1367
Partition MB: 1800 Free MB: 387

FAT copy 2 used

I assume that you still have only Linux installed, and that the
problem partition was not touched since Findpart was run.

I also assume that you know how to mount a partition read only in
Linux.

You then can download the files fp1-1a.bin and tsang1.bat in

http://inet.uni2.dk/~svolaf/tsang1.zip

Put tsang1.bat and fp1-1a.bin on the boot floppy.

Normally a wrong FAT32 boot sector can be edited, but in this case the
boot sector contains a mix of FAT16 and FAT32 values. Therefore a new
boot sector is in fp1-1a.bin.

Run tsang1.bat, which contains:

if not exist fp1-1a.bin goto noexe
findpart getsect 1 330 1 1 1 fp1-1b.bin noheader
set findpart=edit
findpart findfat 1 330 1 33 3601 fat2to1 788
findpart putsect 1 330 1 1 fp1-1a.bin 788 00000000 checkfile
fp1-1b.bin
findpart 1 330 1 - 0B 330 1 1 787 127 63 330 788 128 63 26
set findpart=
findpart 1 fp1-1.txt
:noexe

(Not word wrapped in the batch file).

After that, you can attempt to mount the partition read only in Linux.

Insert the content from fp1-1.txt here.

Svend,

You are brilliant!

I ran tsang1.bat from the boot floppy and it produced the output in
fp1-1.txt as follows:

Findpart, version 4.36.
Copyright Svend Olaf Mikkelsen, 2003.

Searches for partitions type 01, 04, 06, 07, 0B, 0C, 0E, 82, 83,
plus Fdisk F6 and Lilo sectors. Information based on bootsectors
is marked B. If the disk is larger than supported by BIOS, the
supported part of the disk is examined. Disks are numbered from 1.

OS: DOS 8.00

Disk: 1 Cylinders: 788 Heads: 128 Sectors: 63 MB: 3103

-PCyl N ID -----Rel -----Num ---MB -Start CHS- --End CHS-- BS CHS
0 - 83 63 201537 98 0 1 1 24 127 63 B5 3 OK
0 - 83 725760 1935360 945 90 0 1 329 127 63 B0 3 OK
330 1 0B 63 3693249 1803 330 1 1 787 127 63 OK OK
330 - 0B 63 65280 31 330 1 1 338 13 12 BU OK

-----FAT CHS -Size Cl --Root -Good -Rep. Maybe --Bad YYMMDD DataMB
330 1 33 3601 4 4744 3601 0 0 0 990205 1474

Partitions according to partition tables on first harddisk:

-PCyl N ID -----Rel -----Num ---MB -Start CHS- --End CHS-- BS CHS
0 1*83 63 201537 98 0 1 1 24 127 63 OK 3 OK
0 2 05 2661120 3693312 1803 330 0 1 787 127 63 OK
0 3 82 201600 524160 255 25 0 1 89 127 63 OK
0 4 83 725760 1935360 945 90 0 1 329 127 63 OK 3 OK

330 1 0B 63 3693249 1803 330 1 1 787 127 63 OK OK

I booted linux and mounted the filesystem and could see the files!

Fantastic!

Is there more to do?

I can't express how much I appreciate your help.

Thankyou once again.

David