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.

"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)

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.

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.