Hardrive partitions disappeared

Slaved 100 WD gig drive with three partitions. Seagate main drive
with win98SE. Computer crashed. The C: drive was fine, and through
some magic hand waving got it to boot again. Both drives fine. One
week later, same crash.

Now the C: drive (a seagate) is fine when mounted in another win98 pc,
but the 100gig Western Digital returns "no file system" under win98,
winXP gives "drive is unformatted, do you want to format now?" and
Linux (Knoppix) mounts the device but sees no file system.

WD DataLife Guard tools show healthy drive. The data is probably stil
intact. Partition table toasted? Can it be repared? Any ideas?

Thanks,
rcmiv

(rcmiv) wrote in message . com...
Slaved 100 WD gig drive with three partitions.

snip

but the 100gig Western Digital returns "no file system" under win98,
winXP gives "drive is unformatted, do you want to format now?" and
Linux (Knoppix) mounts the device but sees no file system.

WD DataLife Guard tools show healthy drive. The data is probably stil
intact. Partition table toasted? Can it be repared? Any ideas?

Thanks,
rcmiv

This drive was partitioned with (2) 30gig partitions, and 40gig
partition. Now it shows as unformatted in (RAW) in WinXP.

So here is what I have done so far. Partition Magic 8 shows the
entire drive as a single partition labeled "bad." No surprise there,
PM always seems to do this and is not a diagnostic/repair tool anyway.

SpinRite v.6 at all levels. It shows no damaged sectors, and recovers
nothing. Apparently, if I am understanding the function of the
program correctly, it sees nothing that needs repairing/recovery (no
bad sectors).

I used a trial version of getbackdata and found about 284 files worth
of uncorrupted data from the first partition. The other partitions
(basically everything past a certain sector, and I don't remember
which sector) seems to be corrupted and unreadable according to
getbackdata (reports bad sectors). This is odd since WD Data
Lifeguard and Spinrite show no damaged sectors.

Another demo prog called Partiton Table Doctor showed about 15
partitions on the drive, and labelled them all with "Invalid Partition
Table". This program was buggy. It runs in DOS, and menus flake out
and leave graphic artifacts all of the screen, you can only use it for
about 30 seconds before it is impossible to see what is going on and
reboot become necessary. Though it seemed to provide more useful data
than the other programs I have used to date, its instability put me
off, so I canned it.

I haven't gone with the old standards yet, like fisk /mbr or chkdsk -f
because I don't want to lose any data that might still be on the
drive, assuming that just the FAT, partition table, or pointers to the
partitions are screwed.

So that's about 8 - 10 hours of probing the drive, with _very_ limited
success.

I will ask again, to anyone who might have a bunch a free time to
waste:

Any ideas?

Thanks
rcmiv

Any ideas?

Hmm, by the way, were they NTFS or FAT32 (or something else)
partitions ? FAT32 will probably be easier to recover.
I remember I used Powerquest Lost & Found a few years ago to recover
files from a disk I could not access from anything else. I'm not sure
this program still exists, otherwise you may try on www.download.com
by searching 'recovery', hopefully you'll find a tool that will help
you.

Olivier

(tihocan) wrote in message . com...

Any ideas?

Hmm, by the way, were they NTFS or FAT32 (or something else)
partitions ? FAT32 will probably be easier to recover.
I remember I used Powerquest Lost & Found a few years ago to recover
files from a disk I could not access from anything else. I'm not sure
this program still exists, otherwise you may try on www.download.com
by searching 'recovery', hopefully you'll find a tool that will help
you.

Olivier

Thanks for the suggestion. I did get several evaluation version tools
from download.com and some of them provided more or less data from the
drive. Surpirising how much variation there was between on and
another of them in terms of data seen. None of the tools can see
anything but the first 30gig partition, though. Oh well, I'll keep
trying.

Thanks again.
rcmiv