From: Serenella Ciongoli (czs00_at_eng.amdahl.com)
Date: Thu Aug 19 1999 - 18:23:15 EDT
On Thu, Aug 19, 1999 at 04:04:35PM -0500, Rob Bell wrote:
>
> If fdisk doesn't show the D: partition anymore, then chances are that the
> data is gone so far that only expensive, professional data recovery could
> bring anything back. If you can 'find' the partition somehow, then you
> may have a chance. Perhaps another utility like fdisk (maybe the linux
> version or the OS/2 one) would have better luck.
Professional data recovery can be *very* expensive. A couple of months back
I lost an entire drive, thanks to NT Disk Administrator wiping almost out
its partition table. The cheapest Data Recovery agency quoted me $1200 to
recover my data, without any warranty of recovering everything.
I tried the following recovery programs:
- Tiramisu, by Ontrack, http://www.ontrack.com/op/op_7/op_7.asp.
This program exists in different versions for the different file systems
formats. My drive had 2 FAT and 1 NTFS partition. This seems to confuse
the program, as the FAT16 version would only find the FAT16 files, and the
NTFS version would get a program trap after 10 minutes of examining the
drive.
- Lost+Found by Powerquest, at
http://www.powerquest.com/textonly/lostandfound/tx_lafdetail.html
This porgram found and recovered most of the FAT16 files, but, just about
all of them were corrupted.
As I knew the size of the partitions, I ended up using cfdisk, from the
Linux RedHat distribution, to reconstruct the missing entries in the
partition table and then Diskedit from Norton Utilities for Dos 8.0 to
rewrite them. This last program was the best tool I found to examine and
analyze the physical sectors on the drive, even though it does not
understand NTFS control blocks. For those, the comments in the source code
for cfdisk were an essential help.
At the end, the 2 FAT16 partitions came back to life without problems, and
chkdsk recovered the corrupted info in the MFAT for the NTFS partition.
In conclusion, if it is important enough for you, and the file system is not
too badly corrupted, you can recover your data with lots of patience and the
appropriate tools.
Contact me off list if you would like additional details on what I did.
Good luck.
Serenella Ciongoli
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