NO Access to back up drive........Help please!!! [Archive]

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dragonV8

22 Dec 2005, 8:00am

After a system hang/crash reboot attempt of Sally's main computer, 3 error messages came up.

"Winlogon.exe - Bad Image".
"The application or dll C:\windows\system32\shell32.dll is not a valid windows image. Please check this against your installation diskette".

"Services.exe - Bad Image".
"The application or dll C:\windows\system32\shell32.dll is not a valid windows image. Please check this against your installation diskette".

"Lsass.exe - Bad Image".
"The application or dll C:\windows\system32\lsasrv.dll is not a valid windows image. Please check this against your installation diskette".

As you can imagine system was unable to finalise rebooting and went into a boot loop. Tried going into safe mode for a restore point. That was unsuccessful. Next thought was to do a system recovery console. Requiring the system then to boot into safe mode.......this definately would not comply.

So the alternative was to run a system Repair....this was when it was noticed something hinky was a foot. Totally unable to repair system. Infact option wasn't made available. By this time we are in a bit of a panic. Cutting a long story short (events that took place after this, it was realised that all the drives had lost their drive letter assignments) decision today was to sacrifice the C:\ (74gig Raptor) and install another system........ thinking this would sort out the problem and return all drive letters (being 2 x WD 200gig satas) back to original.

How wrong can you be...... Even longer story shorter... had to swap out Raptor (as this had entered for the umpteenth time an endless boot loop) for just a small 8 gig.

System works beautifully now, no rebooting (then again nothing has been installed on the system) BUT!!!!! OMG still no sign of the 2 x 200 gig drives in "My Computer", only C:\ A:\ and DVD drive. So off to disk management (done this many times in the past) to assign them a disk letter.

But no such function available. All options on every drop down menu are greyed out and the only active choice is "DELETE THE PARTITION" NO WAY One of the drives is currently holding backups of all data, Music, Photos etc., that Sally has been working on for weeks to get ready.

We somehow found our way to "DISKPART" in cmd. This see's the Volumes and even has them numbered (point to note here Disk Management Console also saw the drives but only had the deletion option available) opted to assign letter=X but this errored out by saying (you guessed it) that no such drive exists and could not mount the pathway....HUH????

Next event was on to Partition Magic. Apart from the fact this is completely new to us.....it TOO only had the option to delete these partitions. Tried to assign new driver letters - option to change. It to was 'none', Mapped the drive and this sort of gave the impression and hope that this function could and would "unhide" the drives...............Aaaaaa Nuuuuuuu.

So basically we have a now funtioning basic system with the only drives visible are C:\ (system) A:\(floppy) and D:\(DVD burner). The 2 x 200gig data backup drives are no where to be seen in "My Compter" and are completely inaccessible.

Any help immensly appreciated......

C: is a 74Gig Raptor
E: & F: are 200Gig WD sata II's

Black Hawk

22 Dec 2005, 9:40am

That's a real perdicament. Only thing I can think of is maybe trying the drives on another machine and/or OS (linux?).

dragonV8

22 Dec 2005, 10:41am

G'day Hawk. We put the drives in another (XP Pro) computer and still were unable to access them. If only we could figure out how to get them to accept a drive letter. :scratch:

Maybe some changes in the registry????

Unfortunately linux is not an OS we have set up as yet. Built a box ready for one and got software to play with, but since it will be awhile before we'll get to that stage, for now set up XP instead and got it Folding. :)

dragonV8

22 Dec 2005, 3:27pm

Anyone else have any thoughts on this????? :(

Straight_Man

22 Dec 2005, 3:55pm

Um, question-- were the two SATA II drives RAIDed?? If so, connection order and a reestablishment of RAID might need to be done. IF the RAID does not keep its order, R&R the CMOS battery, please (Time shown in BIOS is a good clue to this needing done also).

dragonV8

22 Dec 2005, 4:16pm

Thanks for the reply John.

The 2 sata II disks are data disks only. Had the problem i posted about NOT occurred, the plan was to have a go at setting up our first RAID using those 2 disks with 2 identical others.

The battery is in excellent condition (tested). The mobo is practically new, only having been purchased a few month's ago. It is an MSI P4N Diamond, with a 3.8 Intel proc, 4 x 512 of OCZ ram, 500W Blue Storm PSU (http://www.short-media.com/review.php?r=277) and a Zalman 7700-cu HSF.

Jon

ryko

22 Dec 2005, 5:00pm

do you have an external usb2.0 to sata enclosure or anything? you could try your drives in one of those to see if it helps.

did you disconnect the 2 x 200gb sata hdds when you installed the new OS on the old 8gb hdd? if not i would try again with only the 8gb attached. after OS install and updates (including sata controller), etc... then connect sata drives and see if they show up.

it seems to me that something was done out of order which is preventing you from seeing the hdds. but the fact that you can't see them on any other pc is confusing....

have you tried anything like a data recovery program while the hdds were connected to another machine? something like getDataBack has worked well for me in the past.

Tex

22 Dec 2005, 6:58pm

can you get into recovery console and try and clean the file systems?

Tex

dragonV8

23 Dec 2005, 3:07am

can you get into recovery console and try and clean the file systems?

Tex

Hi Tex, not sure what you mean by "clean the file systems". Could you please point us to a link.
Sally tried this (http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=307545) without success. :shakehead

The first post in this thread barely touches on the things she has tried. Writing it all down would have been at least a 7 page document, so i posted a short version. This is just so frustrating. :(

Screen shot of Computer Management\Storage\Disk Management, which shows the greyed out area's we need access to. This is our predicament.
The drive names:"Backup 1 & Backup 2" were named by Sally prior to the system crash.

dragonV8

23 Dec 2005, 3:27am

Hi ryko. Yes we have a USB enclosure, and we had considered it, but it's an IDE drive only with issues of it's own. It was attached to Sally's computer at the time of the crash.
Now if she tries to access it on her or any other computer, she gets a write error message, of which she remembers this part:"G:\$MFT??..............cannot go further, all data is lost".

When she managed to get into it, sure enough, the folder was empty. :(

The setup of the OS on the 8Gig drive had both 200Gig sata II drives attached. They can be seen in the bios and again in the disk management console as per reply to Tex.

Tex

23 Dec 2005, 10:13am

so its "backup 1" and "backup 2" thats trashed right? Because e: is showing as 97 percent empty so do NOT mess with it if you had stuff on there you want saved.

Do you know for sure which drive holds the critical backup data? If so then shut down and pull that drive right now and send it to me. I'll recover it and ship it back to you for nothing dude. Just pay the shipping both ways. It would be really easy to screw up and lose everything playing around. If it's really important just yank the drive right now and box it up and send it my way. I charge a couple hundred bucks an hour to do this for buisness's. For forum buddy's losing critical family photo's and stuff it's free. Just handle the shipping both ways is all I ask. You lose a couple days time but...... If it's recoverable I can get it. If I can't get it you will pay tens of thousands of dollars to a profesional data recovery service. I am that good. Really.

Tex

dragonV8

23 Dec 2005, 10:29am

Tex, that is the best offer i have heard all year. Sally is finally asleep after trying different ways to get the data back. Been at it for over 48hrs i think.
As soon as she wakes i'll tell her about your offer.

Thank you

Jon

Tex

23 Dec 2005, 10:40am

If she hasnt actually over written any data on those drives in her trials for the last 48 hours and the drives function properly still (sounds like they do btw...) I can recover the data. Only problem gets to be if she reformats or does something and the old data gets over written. That I can't recover from.

Tex

dragonV8

23 Dec 2005, 11:32am

The drives have definitely NOT been reformatted or overwritten. Sally has done everything she knows and done it very patiently, learning more as she goes.
Also trying out a few different data recovery programs, which copied data onto another HDD to see if it is recognisable.

The main backup drive, though it is a 200Gig has way less than half in backup content. Should i need another drive for other purposes, i will buy one as the problem one will NOT be formatted. (Less unneeded aggravation).

Jon

Tex

23 Dec 2005, 11:37am

Also trying out a few different data recovery programs, which copied data onto another HDD to see if it is recognisable.

This should of worked. What was the results?

Tex

dragonV8

23 Dec 2005, 1:06pm

dragonV8

25 Dec 2005, 2:09pm

From what i have seen, Sally used Ontrack EasyRecovery - RawRecovery.

83463 files selected to recover
105.68 GB data to recover. (More than expected)

This is the header on a 38 page file list she printed out. Apart from DIR, all files start with "FIL" followed by numbers, eg....FIL11465.GIF.....300.00KB

Quite a few different file extentions like, MOV, LDB, GRP, HTM, HLP, MP3, WAV, AVI, EFM, RAR, XLS, EXE. BTR, PNG, DLL, MOF and GIF. All starting with FIL followed by numbers.

Basically it is her "My Doc's" folder which has all her data from Incredimail, Office programs, Pdf files, music, etc.

Jon

Well, that appears not to have done the trick. Might have something to do with RAW data. (very new to deal with).
At the moment Sally is trying the same with a program called:"GetDataBack".

A problem we realised was the computer being used for the attempted recovery had the XP Pro OS on 8Gig HDD. Not enough room.

This morning i put the 2 problem HDD's in another computer with an 80Gig C:\ and a 160Gig for writing data to.

When Sally saw the raw data displayed, her comment to me was:" It's NOT life as we know it, Jim". Fortunately for us, she has lots of patience and is dead keen to try and fix this problem.

Tex, having your very generous offer to fall back on, Sally really wanted to try and find a solution whilst being fully aware NOT to disturb the existing data on the 200Gig drive.

I'll post updates.

Jon

dragonV8

31 Dec 2005, 7:16am

WOOHOO............or mabe even.........WOOHOO.:clap: :clap:

Well, Sally managed to get her data back. "GetDataBack" did the trick.:D
Took a long time working through all the files and folders, but the end result is Success.

Once everything is back to normal, she can get it back folding again.

Whilst she had to wait for the recovery, she set her puter up in Raid 0/1. Another learning curve for her.:rolleyes:
Hopefully it will all work out OK.

Just another "Thank You" to Tex for the very generous offer to get her data back if she had no success.:thumbsup:

Thanks Mate.:cheers:

Shorty

31 Dec 2005, 7:37am

Phew is all I can say! I missed this thread as I was too busy sorting out our forum upgrade :(

Im glad you guys got it sorted :)

Leonardo

31 Dec 2005, 7:44am

OH, that is certainly good news.

It sure was fun monitoring the thread. Although it certainly was not your intention, the thread was engaging. I was hurting for you. The good guys just had to win this one - and they did! :cool:

Crypto

31 Dec 2005, 8:42am

Phew !!!!!!

profdlp

31 Dec 2005, 12:10pm

...The good guys just had to win this one - and they did! :cool:
Well said. I love it when that happens. :)