[fritzman]

Working on a friends PC which when I ran AVG, had 17 viruses.

AVG appeared to sort them out, but I noted her drive (HP Pavilion a210a PC with a 40Gb Samsung, 2 partitions... C was fat32 from mem about 7Gb with 700ish free and the balance D was NTFS with about 700ish spare. It booted to D, which had everything on it. Didn't get to look at C, but HP typically put a recovery system there) only had 700Mb free and had not been defragged for ages, so ran Disk Cleanup, and the free came up to a bit over 2Gb (7% free as I remember)

Told it to do it anyway, which it did (took ages) and it mentioned that some files could not be defragged.

Decided to add a 200Gb drive... powered off and added the drive and have not been able to reboot since. Have tried all jumper settings on the Samsung and even tried that with it by itself again... keeps coming up with 'boot disk error... insert system disk' from memory.

Rip the Samsung drive out and put in my normal machine, and hello... the Samsung is detected fine in BIOS, but in WinXP... not seen. Into Partition Magic... the drive is there alright, but is completely unallocated... no partitions at all... everything disappeared.

I haven't tried doing anything yet other than move jumpers again, just in case it is all there, just I have a setting wrong, but I suspect something has caused the drive to throw a hissy-fit and completely reset itself.

Ideas?

What do I do next?

What do I tell my friend?

[petteyg359]

Put it in a Linux system (like Knoppix) and run gpart (I think that's what it's called, and I know it's in Knoppix). It will try to guess the partition table and can rewrite it to the disk.

[fritzman]

Thanks... will not have time to try until Monday, but would appreciate any other ideas also.

(I think I have a linux CD that boots from the CD so hopefully that will have all I need... I have never used Linux at all, so hopefully it will be easy to follow)

[petteyg359]

If you've never used it before it may be a bit challenging. gpart is console-mode only, and the man page instructions aren't especially simple. It can be figured out with a few tries, though. Qtparted is a GUI partition tool, but I don't know if it can check for lost partitions like gpart can, you might try it too.

[fritzman]

Questions:...

1. am I looking at the wrong thing by looking at the partition-table? Is it likely that it is the mbr that is stuffed, and if so, is that easier to repair?

2. If I simply do another install of XP, is it likely along the way as it does to find the previous install and then offer the 'repair the previous installion' option? or do I have to try to recreate the partition table?

3. a bit of an update... I had time to call the HP people yesterday, and the guy suggested I have a look at the drive with 'GetDataBack for NTFS'. I downloaded the trial, and sure enough... the data is there alright, just unable to be seen (hoping that might help give some further clarity to all you wise and 'been there before' ones)

BTW... does anyone have experience in using this... http://www.partition-recovery.com/partition.htm Looks like it might work... the trial certainly finds everything, but I guess I have to pay the bucks to get it to save what it finds to the mbr/partition table.

Bruce

[fritzman]

Update... Tried to use Ghost 7.0 to clone the drive before I start trying anything, and Ghost doesn't see the problem drive. Urgh!

Another question... Someone has suggested using the 'repair' function during a reinstall of WinXP. Anyone tried this??? Is it 'data-destructive'?

I think I'd rather try to rebuid the boot sector/mbr (or whatever needs rebuilding) without having to do another install if poss.

Thoughts?