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Data Disaster - good advice needed!
Hello, all!
With the help of a few bugs here, my stupidity/impacience there and a lot of bad luck, I got myself into loosing all my digirtal photos worse a few years of picture taking. I think, there is still hope, but I really need good advice now. This is what happened: One of my disks in my Win98SE system got to smal to hold all my photos, and since I felt uncomfortable having the last so-so backup two years ago, I decided to get a new disk (External USB 2.0, 160G Samsung with Cypress Chipset in the external Controller). Since there is a limitation of many win 98 tools (scandisk, etc.) for 128 respectively 130-some gigabyte, I decided to make two partitions. The Microsoft fdisk in windown 98SE does not support disks with more than 64G, but there is a fix, which I downloaded. Unfortunately, it did not seem to work correctly with my German operating system. So I downloaded the FDISK from FreeDOS, that can deal with partitions up to 128G without problems. However, it allowed me to make (likely) the first mistake in the chain: I created two primary partitions (each about 80G). Also, there was a bit of space left on the disk (8MB) after the operation. I formatted both partitions, which worked (!) and copied my fotos to the new disk on the second partition (Oh, how I hate this random decission now!!). By doing so, I discovered that a few of my photos were not readible (10 out of several thousand) - a hardware failure of the old disk. So, I had to run scandisk on it. Before doing so, I deleted the content of the old disk since a subsequent defrag-run on the disk would have take forever (40G disk, full to the hilt). The defrag run found bad clustors concentrated in the beginning of the disk. This often means that the drive is about to go, so I decided not to copy the data back but instead buy a second new disk for backup purposes later and life for a week with the data only on the new disk. On the first partition of the new disk, I copied some music and other techi stuff, then I powerered the system down. When I brought the computer up again, the label of the new volume "FOTOS" was gone the file system unreadible. Attempts like to mount it with Linux (r/o) resulted in the wildest errors (254 FATs?), "MagicRecovery" (Demo-Version) crashed trying to scan the drive and no other tool so far could help. However, the Demo of RStudio shows something funny, that makes me think. This is what I see as partition information: F: Fat 32 Start:31.5K Size: 78.1G (This is the working first partition) G: XXX Start:7.5G Size: XXX (This should be the second partition) XXX Start:78.1G Size: 70.9G (This sould be blank) So, here is a major screw-up going on, either in RStudio on on the disk. MS-Windows FDisk shows two partitions, one with 78.1G and one with 70.9G capacity. Both are of the type primary DOS, but the second one (G shows as system "unknown" and no label (evenso there was a label "FOTOS" when I created the partition). The FreeDOS FDISK shows the follwoing: The same sizes and (non) labels, but for both the type "FAT32ext". The Linux cfdisk too agrees basically with the FreeDOS FDISK. However, it also shows the little left-over piece of disk (8MB, mentioned above), that RStudio sees. The difference to rstudio is, that it sees the sizes correctly assigned to the two partitions and the the little left-out bit. Here is my summary: * The lost data was initially correctly written to the respective partition * However, I wrote to the other partition after that - hopefully that aspect does not turn out disasterous when I look at the RStudio interpretation of the partition table! * After a reboot, the data was lost. Now, what do you think should I do? No write attempt on the affected partition has taken place so far. Greetings, B. |
#2
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"Boris" wrote in message
oups.com... Here is my summary: * The lost data was initially correctly written to the respective partition * However, I wrote to the other partition after that - hopefully that aspect does not turn out disasterous when I look at the RStudio interpretation of the partition table! * After a reboot, the data was lost. This cannot be right. If good data was ever written to a correctly installed drive F: or G: it cannot be unwritten or overwritten by a system reboot. Advice: 1. Get a different PC running OK with plenty of hard drive space. 2. Do not work on any of your old drives. Copy the old drives to your new PC and work on the copies. 3. For a permanent archive CDs may seem inconveniently numerous but are safer. You can test each on completion, rapidly duplicate each, etc., and then with confidence delete the source data. -- Don Phillipson Carlsbad Springs (Ottawa, Canada) |
#3
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Hi, Don!
So we are talking in two newsgroups over this subject,. Sorry, normally I do not cross-post, but i found the alt.windows one only later on. I am afraied, it is right. My suspicion is that the RStudio, beeing designed to recover Windows file systems, mimics closest what the File system (not necessarily the partition table) says/thinks. In this case, the two partitions would in fact overlap and writing to the first partition would kill data in the second one - including the FAT and whatever is directory structure is there. The opposit effect was not observed since I wrote in the particular order plus: The beginning of a partition carries all this information. However, that is all just a theory, of course.... Cheers, B. |
#4
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Windows cannot cope with disks larger than 128Gb without considerable
additional assistance. Creating multiple partitions is not a solution. What happens (and it might be the case for you) is that data written to disk in logical sectors above 128Gb actually gets written to the start of the disk, or some other 'random' place. Due to buffering etc you might not notice this until some time after it occurs. You need some good quality data recovery tools, and it seems that's where you are already heading. Most should allow you to see what is recoverable before committing to using it. But whatever process you use, make sure you are doing it with an operating system that can handle a disk of that size without errors. -- Jeff Richards MS MVP (Windows - Shell/User) "Boris" wrote in message oups.com... Hello, all! With the help of a few bugs here, my stupidity/impacience there and a lot of bad luck, I got myself into loosing all my digirtal photos worse a few years of picture taking. I think, there is still hope, but I really need good advice now. This is what happened: One of my disks in my Win98SE system got to smal to hold all my photos, and since I felt uncomfortable having the last so-so backup two years ago, I decided to get a new disk (External USB 2.0, 160G Samsung with Cypress Chipset in the external Controller). Since there is a limitation of many win 98 tools (scandisk, etc.) for 128 respectively 130-some gigabyte, I decided to make two partitions. The Microsoft fdisk in windown 98SE does not support disks with more than 64G, but there is a fix, which I downloaded. Unfortunately, it did not seem to work correctly with my German operating system. So I downloaded the FDISK from FreeDOS, that can deal with partitions up to 128G without problems. However, it allowed me to make (likely) the first mistake in the chain: I created two primary partitions (each about 80G). Also, there was a bit of space left on the disk (8MB) after the operation. I formatted both partitions, which worked (!) and copied my fotos to the new disk on the second partition (Oh, how I hate this random decission now!!). By doing so, I discovered that a few of my photos were not readible (10 out of several thousand) - a hardware failure of the old disk. So, I had to run scandisk on it. Before doing so, I deleted the content of the old disk since a subsequent defrag-run on the disk would have take forever (40G disk, full to the hilt). The defrag run found bad clustors concentrated in the beginning of the disk. This often means that the drive is about to go, so I decided not to copy the data back but instead buy a second new disk for backup purposes later and life for a week with the data only on the new disk. On the first partition of the new disk, I copied some music and other techi stuff, then I powerered the system down. When I brought the computer up again, the label of the new volume "FOTOS" was gone the file system unreadible. Attempts like to mount it with Linux (r/o) resulted in the wildest errors (254 FATs?), "MagicRecovery" (Demo-Version) crashed trying to scan the drive and no other tool so far could help. However, the Demo of RStudio shows something funny, that makes me think. This is what I see as partition information: F: Fat 32 Start:31.5K Size: 78.1G (This is the working first partition) G: XXX Start:7.5G Size: XXX (This should be the second partition) XXX Start:78.1G Size: 70.9G (This sould be blank) So, here is a major screw-up going on, either in RStudio on on the disk. MS-Windows FDisk shows two partitions, one with 78.1G and one with 70.9G capacity. Both are of the type primary DOS, but the second one (G shows as system "unknown" and no label (evenso there was a label "FOTOS" when I created the partition). The FreeDOS FDISK shows the follwoing: The same sizes and (non) labels, but for both the type "FAT32ext". The Linux cfdisk too agrees basically with the FreeDOS FDISK. However, it also shows the little left-over piece of disk (8MB, mentioned above), that RStudio sees. The difference to rstudio is, that it sees the sizes correctly assigned to the two partitions and the the little left-out bit. Here is my summary: * The lost data was initially correctly written to the respective partition * However, I wrote to the other partition after that - hopefully that aspect does not turn out disasterous when I look at the RStudio interpretation of the partition table! * After a reboot, the data was lost. Now, what do you think should I do? No write attempt on the affected partition has taken place so far. Greetings, B. |
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