I am sooo screwed

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AsaJay
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Posts: 596
Joined: Wed Sep 10, 2003 8:56 am
Location: Greater Pacific Northwest

I am sooo screwed

Post by AsaJay » Fri Dec 03, 2004 9:15 am

Help Wanted, recovering data from a crashed W2K drive, Urgent.

Sam, being the little 17 month old boy he is, has learned how to push buttons. No, no, really. He can turn on the VCR, he can hit the eject button on the Laserdisc player (that was -really- funny the first time when the tray smacked him in the head and knocked him over :D ).

Yesterday he moved on to pressing buttons on the UPS for my wife's computer. Can you say 2Ghz to 0 in less than one second? Sure, I knew you could. All that power to protect critical computing equipment in case of power outages, brown-outs, black-outs, lightning strikes, surges, etc. All taken down by a drooling boy in a diaper. gads!

So now, whether caused by or simply manifesting itself from the incident, her 40G Maxtor HD no longer boots.

Here is the rundown:
- Linux can't see it. Linux fdisk gets an I/O error and will not run on the drive.
- Ultimate Bood CD tools allow me to "see" files and partitions, but they are messed up. Can't seem to get a new MBR installed or recover the partitions.
- Boot W2K CD into recovery mode, refuses to run, can't find the drive.
- Downloaded Active@ recover tools, ran, can't seem to recover the MBR or partitions, but it -does- let me "see" the directory names and file names.

I'm thinking I have a FUBR'd disc controller. I shall be working on it intently (between real work) today, in the lab.

If anyone has suggestions, I am more than willing to listen. If you want to come laugh at me for not getting proper backups done :oops: , you can do that too, I won't mind, just remember, I carry concealed :twisted: NO seriously, I'll be trying to attempt recovery again this morning, using another W2K system here at work.

And then later today, I'll probably be spending several hundred dollars at the local Best Buy to continue setting up my backup server (which just wasn't ready in time), as well as some -other- interim backup devices, like an external DVD burner.

BTW, BBQ'd little boy :on_fire: tastes best with Tony Roma's Carolina Honey sauce.
User avatar
AsaJay
pantera pilot
Posts: 596
Joined: Wed Sep 10, 2003 8:56 am
Location: Greater Pacific Northwest

Post by AsaJay » Sat Dec 04, 2004 9:22 am

Well, -that- was fun.

I'm back in business, with the old drive playing second fiddle to a new 120G

Final recovery process:
UBCD, Maxtor tool for testing HD, found errors, submitted to recovery action, -fixed-
(note here: I had done this before, but chickened out on the "fix" button due to the severe warnings of erasing everything, since I knew at that time, I -could- see some things using another tool, I just couldn't recover them.)

Next, had to use Active@ Partition Recovery to find and recover the partitions. Note here: this tool is on the UBCD, but it's only a "demo" version, which does -not- allow you to actually -recover-. Thus we spent $30 to download a 180K file to be -able- to recover these.

Disc was then readable on another W2K system, wherein I promptly copied all 10Gig of files and stuffs off to another source, -and- burned a DVD with all the critical data files.

Drive still refuses to boot, even though I've taken it through several iterations of restoring the MBR and boot sectors. As long as it's going to be a slave I probably won't mess with it, but at this point, with data recovered, I think I can MaxBlast it again and write a new MBR and boot sector; I'll worry about that later.

Installed as second drive (slave, you are now my slave) on my wifes computer with the new 120G as primary. Used the Maxtor Utilitiesto partition and copy the old files over to the new drive.

Reboot, change drive letters so everything is where it is expected to be. . . and voila! Didn't even have to re-install W2K (thank goodness)

The best part, I got the data, and my wife is well, umm, rather grateful!
8)

For posterity, I ended up with a new 120G internal for her computer, a 120G external USB backup for portability, and a 120G internal for the Linux backup server (that previusly had a 5G in it). Out of $411 spent, I get a $30 rebate.

Guess I'll be busy working on that Linux server again this weekend.
:)
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