Harddisk recovery

[Redman]

A collegue of mine is faced with a crashed computer.
No, not with Linux, but with Windows XP.

He has taken it to our IT company and they told him (what I already feared) that his harddisk is alright, except that all partition information is lost. They also told him to keep the harddisk safe until the techniques are there to recover the data

I was wondering, is there a way I can boot a live-cd on it and obtain the lost data?? I am not sure fixing the MBR will automatically solve this problem.

Anyone come across something like this before?

[devils casper]

Download TestDisk, boot up from any LiveCD and execute TestDisk. It will recover lost partition table. It works perfectly.


You can use UBCD or System Rescue CD too. I always try TestDisk first and if it fails ( rarely ), UBCD or SRCD does the job.

[Redman]

Casper ... you are the man!
Bananas deserved:

After fooling around with a livecd (which wouldn't boot regularly on the machine), I added a harddisk of my own and installed Linux on it. The crashed harddisk was connected as slave behind it.

And after installing TestDisk I got it running again in 5 minutes.
Job done!

This turned out to be a very usefull exercise. And I have little doubt it could help others.
Conclusion: sticky

[devils casper]

ahha ! thanx for Bananas.








Casper

[casperl]

What if the computer could not detect a disk even as a slave (means bios can not detect it either)? Is there any way to recover it? I had such a disk now..

[devils casper]

you can recover Partitions of healthy harddisk only. if BIOS is not detecting Harddisk, it means disk is bad. try UBCD or System Rescue CD. both CDs has a lot of disk recovery tools.







Casper

[hamburger123]

download TestDisk, boot up from any LiveCD and execute TestDisk. it will recover lost partition table. it works perfectly.

Wow that worked amazingly. I thought I had to reinstall everything before I found this thread. Thanks so much!

[l8forwork]

norton has a progrom call DISK DOCTOR which ships with nortion utilities and i think system works.

pre ntfs day it would fix partition errors etc.

it runs from cdrom boot...

with a little lookin' ill bet the new program fixes ntfs ---- ill check and update

p.s. i own all of nortons software now fer about 10 yrs.


update::

When not to use Norton Disk Doctor
Do not run the DOS version of Norton Disk Doctor on partitions that were created with Linux FDISK or Disk Druid. If you choose to fix errors on partitions that were created with these utilities, it is critical that you make an Undo file.

Use Norton Disk Doctor to fix an invalid partition only if it is completely inaccessible from Windows or DOS.

Norton Disk Doctor can only revive FAT or FAT32 partitions on computers that are running Windows 2000/XP. It cannot revive NTFS partitions.

To repair corrupted boot records, use the DOS version of Norton Disk Doctor; do not use the Windows version. The Windows version diagnoses the problem, but it will not repair the boot record as well as the DOS version of Norton Disk Doctor.

Norton Disk Doctor might report an error if you use a third-party boot loader. This error report can be safely ignored.

The CD does not support running Norton Disk Doctor on NTFS partitions or FAT16 drives with 64 KB clusters (available in Windows 2000/XP only). If you need support for this capability, install the complete Norton Disk Doctor package on your computer.

[devils casper]

why not to use TestDisk OR UBCD? why to care about Norton's do/don't?
both if these works fine on all FIleSytems.

[Redman]

I think we all have lots of options now.

So topic closed.