XP disk management

[davewuk]

Hmmm, this could be in several places so apologies if this is not the best one!

HD with two Fat32 partitions running XP Home SP2 decides to corrupt to the point that system restore failed to function as did several other applications. I use this area for 'genuine' windows apps like Outlook also My docs. 2nd partition stores 3rd party apps, downloads and some not so critical data. So I had a 2nd drive to hand and decide the easy way is a fresh install then transfer files over however, disk management sees my old drive as uninitialised and naturally I can't get to the data, have I missed something?

[Midknyte]

did you have any overlay software like ezbios or goback?

[ukulele]

You will need a partition recovery utility to fix it. I have yet to find a good free one. The cheapest is active@ partition recovery that I could find.

http://www.partition-recovery.com/

[davewuk]

Cheers for replies. No overlay software Midknyte and hoped to avoid recovery programs Ukulele but that looks more likely thanks for link. I also managed to find that program this afternoon, I'll give it a go in demo mode and see what it discovers. I did however manage to extract all documents off of the first partition using '98 and good old DOS (wow, that took ages) but still can't get to the second - need to think if there is anything of great importance stored there, might be easier to forget it and start over!

[rmanet]

........you're lucky you used FAT32 instead of NTFS - you can recover files easier and using DOS - it's why I cling to the old FAT system on my kid's machines. I've had XP crash way too many times and when using NTFS on 3 machines here I always backup to a second drive or DVD my important stuff.

Good luck getting to everything - like you said, it takes time but at least you'll find them. XTree Gold was an old DOS app that worked great at fishing around on a system - try a google search and you may find it or something similar. I still use it occasionally on the 4 XP FAT machines my kids use.

[davewuk]

Only managed to get the first partition info back, but that was enough. Wish you hadn't reminded me about Fat and NTFS cos I decided to go the latter :eek: - better back up strategy now though (I hope) second disk mirrored :D

[Duke523]

Iomega NAS with SCSI REV...hmm...wish I had the moeny.

[ukulele]

I too liked FAT32 for quite a while after NTFS was introduced but now-a-days NTFS is better in a few ways. Aside from the advantages of better performance with larger file sizes and disk sizes and much better security control, the NTFS file system recovery options are now better then Fat32. You just need the right utilities. Even the one I listed above can recover lost files with a boot floppy. With boot sectors as the first and last file on the disk, catastrophic failure is minimized. Finally let's not forget the disk space that is much more efficiently utilized with NTFS.

[Duke523]

I have a licence for Restoer 2000 Pro...No Floopy though :(

Great for hooking up other peoples hard drive to my computer and recovering their files/part/HDD

I think I need to invest in some other recovery software...I will have to check out the one listed above.

davewuk, hope you fix your problems

[Ol'Tunzafun]

Check the status of that disk in Disk Management. Only dynamic disks can be "uninitialized". If this is the case, then go to the Action menu and choose Rescan. Right click any drive marked "foreign" and click "import".

[ukulele]

Dynamic disks are not supported by Windows XP Home.