HDD Partition Recovery

T-shirt · Posted: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 12:16:33 Post Subject:

From the link I mentioned above,( I've also seen this elsewhere, maybe at technet or the MS KB)

"Fdisk warnings
If partitions are lost, the DOS/Windows 95/98/ME Fdisk create partition screen should not be entered. Just entering the screen will write sectors containing ascii 246 (hex F6) to large areas in the beginning of free partition space. If this happens, most data can be recovered anyway, but it will be more difficult.

Attempting to recover a partition by creating a new using standard partitioning tools may cause more damage than Fdisk, since FAT or other data structures may be created at the same time as the partition table entry.

Do not use DOS Fdisk if non FAT logical partitions are present. http://www.partitionsupport.com/utilities.htm
EC the reason I suggested this one was, it works in the way I believe/was taught partition tables work.
it's downside is that it is manual, non GUI , but that means it's less likely to overwrite something important, just more of a pain to use.
It sounds like you are at the "fix it or reformat" stage anyway.
She may just have to live with the data loss, but that lesson is "Backup, BEFORE you have problems"

T-shirt · Posted: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 12:31:49 Post Subject:

BeerCheeze · Posted: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 13:55:26 Post Subject:

Yea, I know all about FDISK (Used it for 15+ years now), and I'm not sure what version of Fdisk they are talking about because Fdisk doesn't write anything at all until you tell it to.

And as I've said... I've done all the basic stuff, which includes putting in the XP disk and dropping to a recovery console.