Does anyone have SpinRite 5.0 or know how to recover screwed partiton data?

[Babulmiah]

Hi,

I tried to use Norton Utilties 2000 "unerase.exe" to undelete a 250KB zip file under DOS.

The program seemed to work (prompted me to enter the missing filename character e.g. 'f' for ?ilename.zip) but has completly stuffed the data on my drive!

I have the reocvery tool Lost and Found, but it is not doing the job! I had SpinRite on the drive that was stuffed.

Does anyone have a copy of SpinRite they can send me? or know of other good recovery tools that can recreate the FAT based on the sector data information (as much of what I see under Lost and Found seems to be intact, but L&F cannot recover the data due to an "unable to close disk" error".

Thanks.


[UPDATE 2000/06/05 @ 16:00GMT]

cTaylor -
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Thanks for the info :-) Sorry for any confusion, the problem is nothing to do with a Zip drive, but recovery of a .zip file.

I was using Lost & Found v1.06 from floppy to try and recover HDD data screwed by trying to recover a .zip file using Nortons UNERASE.EXE (hope it makes sense ;-)).

Anyway UNERASE.EXE allegedly recovered my .zip file (thats what the program stated), but infact trashed the HDD contents.

I tried to use L&F from floppy, but the program would not "close" disk 2 properly. Anyway, I sector copied the L&F second disk onto a second floppy and it worked fine!

Strangely, L&F is very tempremental about the media it is stored on - I used it months ago and oringinally it would not boot from the frist floppy, after duplicating the files on a second disk, it booted fine.

I always use good media and throughly test before using to store critical programs like L&F, and think L&F might cause these floppy probs (the disks have no bad sectors etc).

zskillz -
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If you need L&F, mail me :-)

All -
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Well for reference (if anyone cares ;-)) I'll tell how I solved my HDD prob.

After using L&F to recover my most recent data (I have backups of the rest of the 8GB). I then decided that is is a perfect opportunity to try out other recovery methos for HDD using the Nortons Utilities 2000 tool sets.

Anyway, I ran the Disk Doctor, through Win and DOS without making any changes to see what they will pick-up. Both are the same.
I then ran NDD from DOS boot disks to recover my partiton data. To cut long story short, it did not fix problems accurately, directory structures were lost (get names like DIR001, DIR002 in root) containing elements of program and data files. Lost of junk files (._dd - disk doctors version of .chk), and no long file names.

I restored a image of the partiton I made and tried again with NU2000 in Windoze with much the same results!!.

CONCLUSION

1.
BE VERY CAREFUL about using UNERASE.EXE, I used it only once (on a fully error checked and tested - via several tools, not just scandisk - partition) and WILL NEVER EVER USE IT AGAIN!.

2.
Notorns Utilities although has some good things (speeddisk) is on the most **** and SHOULD NOT BE TRUSTED FOR MAJOR REPAIRS without trying drive recovery tools first. As if the repairs go wrong, like for me, you are screwed more (recovery tools less likely to succeed).

Also if you visit the NU2000 support site in the Syamantec website (www.symantec.com) you'll see lots of people with lots of NU probs! Urrrggghhh!!!

3.
Finally, if a problem does occur where data seems corrupted, try using some thing like spinrite (www.grc.com) to rebuild the FAT from the HDD actual sector info (does it more accurately than lots of other progs I've tried, and I've tried loads!)
OR
Just use scandisk and accept the .chk files it chucks, as atleast much of what you have will be recoverable i.e. atleast you'll get most dir/file structure.

After reading this, if you're still awake ;-), thanks for replies/help all.

[This message has been edited by Babulmiah (edited 06-05-2000).]

[ctaylor]

I don't know if this helps much, but a google.com search on "close disk" yielded the following URL: http://www.storage.ibm.com/hardsoft/.../load/load.htm

This page indicates that "closing a disk" is like "unloading a disk" and refers to a hardware failure in a HDD. I don't know the innerds of a zip drive, but suspect that this might be relevant

[zskillz]

if u don't mind me asking.. where did u get lost and found and for how much?

[Gentle Giant]

zskillz Lost and Found:
http://www.powerquest.com/lostandfound/index.html
$69.95

[This message has been edited by Gentle Giant (edited 06-04-2000).]