LBA problems ahoy! Maxtor 300 gig shows up as a 128 gig

This thread is now about recovering a dynamic NTFS partition.

This is a spinoff of a question I posed in the MS OS forum.

I just reformatted and reinstalled XP Pro on my C drive, a 74 gig SCSI. My D drive beforehand had been a single dynamic partition of about 270 gigs (formatted size) on a Maxtor Diamondmax 10. I patched to SP1, then to SP2, and then just to be sure I installed the Maxtor registry fix for 48-bit LBA support so as to be able to address partitions above 137 gigs once more.

It didn't work though. This is what disk administrator is giving me:



Partition Magic says the whole damn thing is a bad partition too.

I followed the explicit instructions on Microsoft's knowledge base about enabling 48-bit LBA support here. My ATAPI.SYS is newer than the version they specify, and my registry entries are correct with what they list, but I am still unable to see the partition I had there.

The kicker is that that is my media/storage drive, thus it has virtually everything I need on it. The data remains intact, however, I am unable to access it. This is on my Abit IC7 and the ICH5 southbridge's native SATA.

Any ideas?

I seen you said that Partition magic says the whole partition is bad. However did you try to delete the partition, then recreate and format it from partition magic. I have had to do that with my larger drives, pretty much leave windows out of the picture and do it all from partition magic.

edit: forgot to read that it had everything on it. that puts a bad spin on things. One thing to try is that i see that the partition is now basic. change that back to dynamic. From what i understand you can go from basic to dynamic without losing anything however you cant go from dynamic back to basic so that is where it is pry messed up if it was dynamic before.

Was the Maxtor connected to the system when reinstalling the Pre SP1 XP?

The problem may stem from the use of Dynamic Disks. I've had similar problems when they first started being used.

What I'd recommend first is to use either Ontrack's Easy Recovery or Convar's PC Inspector to access and recover the files before any further attempts at saving the partition. PC Inspector is freeware and runs within Windows. It's not infallible, but often successful when windows cannot read the drive.

After getting the data, zero and recreate the partition and you should be fine.

use maxblast. it works on partitioning the drive to its full size. i have done it with my 250 gb maxtor diamond max 9 and a winxp pro disc (before sp1) and it worked like a charm. good luck.

Thanks for all the replies.

cooter said:

edit: forgot to read that it had everything on it. that puts a bad spin on things. One thing to try is that i see that the partition is now basic. change that back to dynamic. From what i understand you can go from basic to dynamic without losing anything however you cant go from dynamic back to basic so that is where it is pry messed up if it was dynamic before.

Click to expand...

That's one thing I thought of. According to this page, I should be able to do it. I'm a bit hesitant to though.

Sonny said:

Was the Maxtor connected to the system when reinstalling the Pre SP1 XP?

Click to expand...

Yeah, but I also tried leaving it disconnected until I had patched through SP2. No joy in either case, obviously.

Xaotic said:

The problem may stem from the use of Dynamic Disks. I've had similar problems when they first started being used.

What I'd recommend first is to use either Ontrack's Easy Recovery or Convar's PC Inspector to access and recover the files before any further attempts at saving the partition. PC Inspector is freeware and runs within Windows. It's not infallible, but often successful when windows cannot read the drive.

After getting the data, zero and recreate the partition and you should be fine.

Click to expand...

Awesome. I'm glad the problem has been isolated. I'll try this solution before anything else.

edit: PC Inspector is reporting a bad boot sector on the drive, so it's not showing the contents. I'm scanning the whole physical drive in hopes that it will list the contents when it's done. I may be doing something wrong though.

donny_paycheck said:

Yeah, but I also tried leaving it disconnected until I had patched through SP2. No joy in either case, obviously.

Click to expand...

During the first install using a standard XP CD with the drive connected is what might have caused the drive to be repartitioned accidentaly. When the install routine did not recognize the 300G partition it might have set it to 127G.

Makes sense, Sonny.

Alright here's the deal: I was able to procure a copy of Ontrack's recovery software from my employer. It found the old dynamic partition, and the files within it. I then was able to copy all of said files across the LAN to my file server, at which point I reformatted the drive, this time using a BASIC partition. Now, the files are moving on back to the drive.

This whole issue could have been avoided if I hadn't been stupid and thought that dynamic partitions were worth the trouble.

Thanks to everyone who helped me out, especially Xaotic.

I searched and posted to an older thread, but since the tools were mentioned here- I just tried PC Inspector and when I scanned my drive, I got this error: