I fouled up both the clone and the original!

This is a better-organized version of a post I made in other groups, but
I need more answers and I can't post to 5 groups at once.

This is mostly about NTFS partitions, I think, even though I was running
Vista. (I'm running a bare-bones version of 10 now.)

I have managed to screw up my clone partition D:, I believe by copying
individual files files from my C: partition to it, and somehow I also
fouled up the C: partition itself at the same time, even though I didn't
copy anything to it.

How could I have screwed up C: if I only copied files from it? Even
assuming, and it's only a guess, that I got mixed up and changed some of
the permissons in C: to "full control", I still didn't copy anything to
the C: partition, and I know that because I always used the same .bat
file to do the copying and it had only one line in it. The C:
partition was in hibernation at the time.


The current situation is that when I boot into Hiren's** Mini-XP and use
7z File Manager, it says that both the C and D partitions have total
size of 4,359,820 big but they both have 5,322,718,610,194,432 free
space. Huh? Huh!!!!!

And while it says the RAMDrive that the CD created and the MiniXP
partition X: are NTFS, it lists NO file System for C or D: Huh?
Clicking on the partition letters does nothing; it doesn't open up the
list of first level directories for C or D like it does for the two
other partitions. Using a command window, it says for C: "The file or
directory is corrupted and unreadable."


Is there a program that will correct the "geometry" or whatever it's
called of these partitions?

Should I run CHKDSK, SCANDISK or something like that? Should I be
trying to fix the FAT table or whatever NTFS uses instead. The boot
record, the boot sector? Those partition size numbers are absurd.

Should I reload Vista from a Vista CD? Or will doing that now overlay
files that Scandisk could have restored?


Originally I had a clone of CL that had been made several days earlier,
and I had gotten new mail, usenet posts, and 76 Windows Uptdates during
that time, so I booted from Hiren's CD and I used XXCopy to copy those
changes in my C: partition to my clone, 7500 files and directories were
copied the first time, but 1300 failed.

Paul pointed out that the problem might be permissions, so I went back
and before starting to copy I changed permissions in the security tab
for the destination Drive to "full control". That allowed several
files two directories down in Program Files, iirc, to be successfully
copied,

It seemed everything left was in the Windows directory so I changed the
permission for Windows to full control, and (though I can't easily read
my log files now) it either didn't change anything or it changed a few.

I added sxs\manifests and a couple more directories and I got it
down to 335 errors from the earlier 1300, but adding the next couple
directories (to match where the errors were) didn' t change things.


So I rebooted and went back to my normal C: drive, which I had
hibernated before doing all this. It started up and looked fine, all
the program tabs were in the task bar and Eudora was showing, and I
could type into the partially finished email, but when I
tried to save it as an email draft, it said it couldn't open the Outbox.
I looked in Explorer and it was there and not read only.

So I went to Agent, and it couldnt' find the ini file,

One or two more things like this and I restarted the computer.

Now it won't restart. It gets to the point where the 1/2 inch wide
3-boxes thing moves over and over from left to right in the 3" flat
bubble, and then it just restarts. And the clone, (which now has more
files, but is still missing 335) comes closer to starting, but it
doesn't start either.

I tried Safe Mode, by itself, with command line, and with Networking,
and it displays the list of files it's loading and the last one it shows
is AVGIDSHX.sys which I guess relates to AVG, but iirc this
is still a good file and it's the one after it which is causing the
problem. I don't k now which one that is.


But a bigger problem is that so it seems NONE of the les cannot be
opened, even text files using a Mini-XP CD.

And when I boot into Hiren's Mini-XP and use 7z File Manager, it says
that both the C and D partitions have total size of 4,359,820 big but
they both have 5,322,718,610,194,432 free space. Huh? Huh!!!!!

Should I run CHKDSK, SCANDISK or something like that? Should I be
trying to fix the FAT table or whatever NTFS uses instead. The boot
record, the boot sector? Those partition size numbers are absurd.

Should I reload Vista from a Vista CD? Or will doing that now overlay
files that Scandisk could have restored?



I don't understand how I did this damage, especially to the source
partition, which afaik I changed not at all. Maybe if I knew how I did
this damage it would help to reverse it.

It's conceivable that, in those latter tries that didn't work any
better, I got mixed up and changed the permissions in the source
directories and not the destinations, but nothing else could have made
use of these excessively permissive permissions between then and
rebooting into C: And the Outbox was there, it just couldnt' be opened
by me. How would increasing permission to "full control" cause that?
(And are permission settings made while running from a CD still there
after booting from C:?)

I never did any moves by hand. In every case I used the same bat file,
which only copied from C: to D: I have no bat files that modify C: and
I didn't even have to retype the name of the bat file. I just pressed
the Up-Arrow key while in the cmd window to recall my previous command.




(I have backups of all the standard data, but not my Firefox history,
bookmarks, and even if I had everything I want to fix this, not throw in
the towell.

**I was using Hiren's btw. I wrote a good defense of any copyright
issues associated with it, but it's in my old partition that I can't
read or copy very well now. In brief it said that MS said that its
version of windows could be used to repair a licensed version of
windows, which makes sense and is what I'm trying to do.

Thanks in advance from a desperate guy.

"micky" wrote in message
...

(I have backups of all the standard data, but not my Firefox history,
bookmarks, and even if I had everything I want to fix this, not throw in
the towell.

I have read about your woes in other groups. My best advice is, "Throw in
the towel"' get out your OS install disk and reinstall to your main drive.
The loss of things like Firefox history/boolmarks is trivial. True, you
will have to reinstall your programs...the alternative is to keep mucking
around with your screwed up drives until you finally decide to reinstall.
Once reinstalled, you can play with your messed up clone drive as much as
you want.

Second best advice, next time us Macrium to IMAGE your drive making sure you
have also used it to make something - CD, thumb drive, whatever - bootable
so that you are able to boot to a recovery environment and restore an image.

micky wrote:

The current situation is that when I boot into Hiren's** Mini-XP and use
7z File Manager, it says that both the C and D partitions have total
size of 4,359,820 big but they both have 5,322,718,610,194,432 free
space. Huh? Huh!!!!!

And while it says the RAMDrive that the CD created and the MiniXP
partition X: are NTFS, it lists NO file System for C or D: Huh?
Clicking on the partition letters does nothing; it doesn't open up the
list of first level directories for C or D like it does for the two
other partitions. Using a command window, it says for C: "The file or
directory is corrupted and unreadable."

There are two kinds of utilities for disk work.

1) Repair in place (like CHKDSK).
This alters the device you're trying to fix.

2) Scavengers (Photorec, Recuva)
These write to an external drive, and do not
affect the source drive.

For (1), you want to backup the disk before doing
the repair attempt.

Commercial backup utilities will not back up damaged
disks. They may do some kind of check before the backup
begins. If they notice corruption, the backup stops.

The "dd" disk dump program doesn't care about this.
It copies all the sectors from one disk to another.

For Windows, the port is here.

Instructions:

http://www.chrysocome.net/dd

Download:

http://www.chrysocome.net/downloads/dd-0.6beta3.zip

For disk backup, the destination must be as large
as, or bigger, than the source drive.

Let's take my disk config today. I've snipped
a piece of it. Two of the drives are 500GB drives.

\\?\Device\Harddisk1\Partition0 --- points to whole disk
link to \\?\Device\Harddisk1\DR1
Fixed hard disk media. Block size = 512
size is 500107862016 bytes
\\?\Device\Harddisk1\Partition1 --- (selects first partition only)
link to \\?\Device\HarddiskVolume9
\\?\Device\Harddisk2\Partition0 --- points to whole disk
link to \\?\Device\Harddisk2\DR2
Fixed hard disk media. Block size = 512
size is 500107862016 bytes

These disks would be in the same order as seen
in Disk Management. You will be able to
match the partition descriptions to the disks,
to be sure you're on the right disk.

Say I want to copy Disk 1 to Disk 2.

dd if=\\?\Device\Harddisk1\Partition0 of=\\?\Device\Harddisk2\Partition0

Now, that would copy sectors, 512 bytes at a time. And would run at
13MB/sec. It'll take a while.

If instead, I specify a block size, I can make it run faster.
For example, what if I told it to copy 8192 bytes, which is 16 sectors
of 512 bytes each ?

Take the total disk size 500,107,862,016 / 8192 .
That happens to divide evenly, but the resulting
number is not a multiple of 2. So I could not select 16384
for example. My command becomes

dd if=\\?\Device\Harddisk1\Partition0 of=\\?\Device\Harddisk2\Partition0 bs=8192

Now, say I needed to make the command stop precisely at the end of
the disk, no matter what. I can also specify a "count" of blocks.

500,107,862,016 / 8192 = 61048323

dd if=\\?\Device\Harddisk1\Partition0 of=\\?\Device\Harddisk2\Partition0 bs=8192 count=61048323

Because I've been careful to pick the numbers, it should
copy every last byte of the 500,107,862,016 byte disk. Since
the blocks divide evenly, I will be copying an integral number
of blocks, without snipping off the last block.

In Linux, maybe the command would look like

sudo dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/dev/sda3 bs=8192 count=61048323

So that's how you make a basic sector-by-sector copy
of a damaged hard drive. It does not matter what
file systems are present, or whether they are healthy.
They get copied.

For disks which are actually throwing CRC errors (not your case),
the bottom portion of this page gives a hint (ddrescue). It's
a copy of "dd", with handling for CRC errors.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Damaged_Hard_Disk

*******

And while I was over there, I discover TestDisk has an undelete.
Now, how cool is that ?

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Undel..._with_TestDisk

So now the tricky part. Presumably CHKDSK has to be clean
before you can Undelete. So the potential sequence would be.

1) Backup with dd first (in case you'll be at this for days and days).
2) Run CHKDSK on the damaged partition.
If it passes, on to step 3.
3) Run TestDisk, use Undelete, store the files on yet another
spare hard drive.

That requires one hard drive as big or bigger than the damaged
one. Plus a second drive to hold "undeleted" files, and you'd need
to use your best guess on how much this would be (20GB?).

If CHKDSK in (2) fails, and seems to have made a mess of the
device-under-test, you reverse your "dd" and put the
backup data onto the source drive. Let's say sda2 was 500GB
and sda3 was 1TB. sda3 would be half full. By specifying
both a block count and block size, I can copy just half
of the 1TB hard drive, with precision. So learning how
to factor the numbers, helps.

sudo dd if=/dev/sda3 of=/dev/sda2 bs=8192 count=61048323

And I'm not Kreskin. I cheat. I use a program called factors.exe
to factor 500,107,862,016 into all of its prime numbers. So
I have a good idea what divides into it, and how to pick my
block size and so on. I just happen to know from experience,
that while 8192 isn't necessarily the best number, it works
with a *lot* of my drives. So is my first choice if I don't
want to do a lot of work figuring it out.

It turns out, that older drives copy best with large block
sizes, while modern drives are just as happy with small
transfers. Just not too small though. Using 8192 is an
attempt to get a good transfer speed out of the disk.
For an older disk, I might attempt to use 221184 = 8192 * 3 * 3 * 3.
Whatever number I use, must divide evenly, so the whole disk
will get transferred.

Paul

micky wrote:


The current situation is that when I boot into Hiren's** Mini-XP and use
7z File Manager, it says that both the C and D partitions have total
size of 4,359,820 big but they both have 5,322,718,610,194,432 free
space. Huh? Huh!!!!!

And while it says the RAMDrive that the CD created and the MiniXP
partition X: are NTFS, it lists NO file System for C or D: Huh?
Clicking on the partition letters does nothing; it doesn't open up the
list of first level directories for C or D like it does for the two
other partitions. Using a command window, it says for C: "The file or
directory is corrupted and unreadable."

If you have another Windows computer to plug the drive
into, you can scan it with TestDisk. That's if you
think the MBR isn't correctly reflecting the partitions.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

If Disk Management shows the squares, but they won't mount or
do anything, that's a different matter. You can execute
CHKDSK on a drive letter, but CHKDSK also takes a GUID
for a partition argument. Perhaps neither of the necessary
materials are working right now.

I would recommend PTEDIT32, which displays the MSDOS partition
table on the drive. But it's not available for download any more.
It used to be on the Symantec FTP site, but got removed a year
or two ago. What you'd be looking for there, is that what you
think is an NTFS partition, has a partition type of 07.
Hidden NTFS are 27, for comparison. If I changed your partition
to 27, that would be enough to give bad symptoms.

This is a freebie to rescue files off a FAT32 or NTFS partition.
The author just finished the NTFS part, and at least one
USENET poster managed to successfully get files back. He stopped
working on it, and may have sold it to another developer. The
free version however, should still do something.

http://web.archive.org/web/200701010...rescue19d.html

This is a screen shot of Drive Rescue at work.

http://www.4yougratis.it/software/_img/Drive-Rescue.jpg

Paul

"Paul" wrote in message
...
micky wrote:

snip


I would recommend PTEDIT32, which displays the MSDOS partition
table on the drive. But it's not available for download any more.
It used to be on the Symantec FTP site, but got removed a year
or two ago.
Paul

Available from PendriveApps
- http://www.pendriveapps.com/tag/ptedit32-exe/

Regards
wasbit

--

In message , wasbit
writes
Available from PendriveApps
- http://www.pendriveapps.com/tag/ptedit32-exe/

Which leads to an ftp site that either doesn't exist or needs a
password?
--
Bill

"Bill" wrote in message
...
In message , wasbit
writes
Available from PendriveApps
- http://www.pendriveapps.com/tag/ptedit32-exe/

Which leads to an ftp site that either doesn't exist or needs a password?

Au contraire, mon frere. It leads to a page of info which has a link to
another page for download.

dadiOH wrote:
"Bill" wrote in message
...
In message , wasbit
writes
Available from PendriveApps
- http://www.pendriveapps.com/tag/ptedit32-exe/
Which leads to an ftp site that either doesn't exist or needs a password?

Au contraire, mon frere. It leads to a page of info which has a link to
another page for download.

The link provided on that page is this one:

ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/englis...s/PTEDIT32.zip

Which is no longer valid.

A bunch of content was removed from the Symantec FTP server a year or more ago.
And FTT sites don't get archived in archive.org .

I've not located a replacement (publicly accessible) source.

Paul

In message , dadiOH
writes

"Bill" wrote in message
...
In message , wasbit
writes
Available from PendriveApps
- http://www.pendriveapps.com/tag/ptedit32-exe/

Which leads to an ftp site that either doesn't exist or needs a password?

Au contraire, mon frere. It leads to a page of info which has a link to
another page for download.

Which says "Ths page cannot be displayed".

And my ftp client ( which I rarely use, so may not understand) says

"Command: AUTH TLS
Response: 234 Security data exchange complete.
Status: Initializing TLS...
Response: 534 Request denied for policy reasons
Error: GnuTLS error -15: An unexpected TLS packet was received.
Error: Could not connect to server"
--
Bill

On 11/09/2016 14:24, Bill wrote:
In message , dadiOH writes

"Bill" wrote in message
...
In message , wasbit

writes
Available from PendriveApps
- http://www.pendriveapps.com/tag/ptedit32-exe/

Which leads to an ftp site that either doesn't exist or needs a
password?

Au contraire, mon frere. It leads to a page of info which has a link to
another page for download.

Which says "Ths page cannot be displayed".

And my ftp client ( which I rarely use, so may not understand) says

"Command: AUTH TLS
Response: 234 Security data exchange complete.
Status: Initializing TLS...
Response: 534 Request denied for policy reasons
Error: GnuTLS error -15: An unexpected TLS packet was received.
Error: Could not connect to server"

You've got your FTP client set up in a strange way.
It's trying to to TLS!

There is no problem with fetching other files from that server with a
normal FTP client or a web browser.

For instance try starting he ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/

--

Brian Gregory (in the UK).
To email me please remove all the letter vee from my email address.