BootMagic turned NTFS to Fat32 - data loss?

e-nation

i am running XP Pro SP1 on a 10gig Fat32 drive (Drive A) on one of my PC's. i needed to use this PC to access info from a 120 gig NTFS drive (Drive B, also XP pro) which i removed from another currently inoperable system (inoperable due to a problem unrelated to the 120 gig drive that i removed from that PC).

i decided to install Drive B into Drive A's case as a slave (having forgotten about the differences in file systems on the two drives at the time). the installation was a success, and i browsed the files and folders on Drive B using the OS on Drive A, but realized that i needed to gain access to info on an email in OutlookExpress on Drive B. Having encountered this issue with OE before, i know it's not easy to retrieve or import old email messages from a slave drive.

wishing to avoid researching the methods to "import" email data from OE from Drive B to Drive A, i decided to install boot magic on Drive A system with intent to simply boot into the Drive B's XP at startup from the BootMagic menu (dual boot system) and open OE there, thereby emulating a sort of business as usual in my main system, Drive B.
with bootmagic installed on the Drive A, and the Bmagic configured to add Drive B as a bootable partition, i restarted the computer and attempted to boot into Drive B's OS. This method was a Failure!
frustrated, i finally removed Drive A in an attempt to use Drive B as the master single boot drive in order to gain access to the information that i sought in Outlook. to my despair, the drive would not boot as master, even though the jumpers are properly set (none, actually on this WD drive), the BIOS recognized it and the boot sequence seemed to function normally.
crossing my fingers, i went back to using only Drive A to boot the system. success!

i wanted to try using Drive B as a slave again, so i re-installed it, but, to my surprise, Drive A now sees it as Fat 32 instead of its previous NTFS, and i am unable to access the directory/ folders/ files in Drive B from Drive A. i opened boot magic again (still operating from the Drive A OS) and it is showing 1 primary and 1 extended partition on the on Drive B, but that drive had previously been only 1 partition in NTFS mode.

MY CONCLUSION: I fear that BootMagic has made some changes to the file system on Drive B. Is this possible, even though BootMagic was only "installed" on Drive A? If so, what changes might have been made? Looking on the bright side, I'm hoping that perhaps the errors are due to some mis-configuration of Drive B in it's foreign placement in Drive A's case/ motherboard, etc. any ideas?

i have vast amounts of important information and media files on that drive. i need to un-do whatever damage it is that i have done during this Drive swap/ BootMagic disaster in order to access the critical data. i hope someone can please help, or at least advise me on where i should turn.

--js

kryyst

Ugly that's about all I can say.....

First getting OE stuff off a second drive is simple. Just copy the identities folders to the primary and import them, works every time. You should have asked that first here and perhaps saved a lot of grief

As for your drive problem. I'm not 100% sure what happend just based on your description nothing should have changed. But I'm guessing that when you told it to boot drive B it re-wrote the boot sector on the drive using the boot information from drive A. So it poot a FAT32 boot sector on drive B. Now since drive B isn't really a FAT32 disk it's got a garbage boot sector that is messing up the whole drive.

As to what steps to take to fix the problem that's where it gets iffy. Trying to repair the drive may have some horrible effects because it may see the boot sector and assume the whole drive should be that way and essentially just trash whatever possible ntfs partition is still there.

First couple questions. If you are checking partition sizes does the whole drive add up or is there a huge missing chunk? If the whole drive is adding up there is a good chance the tables got re-written and you've probably lost everything. If there is a huge missing chunk then there may be hope.

Normally in a FAT table look up NTFS will show up as an extended partition so that could be a good thing.

Now if you boot up with A and have B as a slave can you go to dos and cd to drive B and see anything even if it's just a prompt or does it just give you a drive error?

If you can at least get to a prompt on the drive you could try to convert it back to NTFS with the command:

convert volume /FS:NTFS
where volume is the drive letter of the drive.

Another thing you could try is to just put drive B in as master and set the bios to boot off CD. The boot up with the XP cd in and do a repair and see if it'll repair the drive.

Beyond that try getting a copy of Partition magic for NTFS (think it's version 8) and see if you can see any partition information then split the partition to capture that good data on it's own partition copy it back to drive A and totally whipe drive B and re-build it.

e-nation

thanks for your reply.
something i forgot to mention...

when Drive B didn't boot as Single Master, i inserted the BM startup disk and it found the partition w/ the OS (only partition originally on the drive, and only partition showing in BM), and i hit the number 1 to select it to boot. still not booting of course, it was at that point that i did nothing else to Drive B but switch it back to Slave to attempt to browse the folders while booting from Drive A. it was at that point that i noticed the "change" from NTFS to Fat32

does that help w/ your assesment?

e-nation

here's a screen capture of what Partition Magic shows for my "Drive B"
http://www.e-nationmusic.com/pics/PM8_screen.jpg

kryyst

I think when you used the BM tool it re-wrote the table on your drive so now your table is definitely screwed up. Your unallocated space is probably where all your data still is - intact for that matter. Obviously the trick is getting it back. Partition magic doesn't have tools to fix it, it'll probably only make matters worse.

So now seeing that not sure what sort of tools Norton Disk Doctor has currently as I have avoided all of norton's stuff (asside from anti-virus) like the plague for years now. But they may have something there.

I'd still try and use the OS repair tools they may be able to find the information for you. Running convert on the drive won't do anything now because that data isn't on an assigned drive letter.

In all reality though I think you may be screwed.

e-nation

i hate to go this route, but what about the option of sending the drive to "professionals" who specialize in data recovery? does anyone out there know of a data recovery agency that they would trust?

it's my own fault for not having a backup, but the stuff i have on this drive is several years worth (accumulated from old drives, etc) of multi-media, and documents containing sheet music, mailing lists for my band, not to mention the email addresses and messages that i had originally been searching for in outlook express.

thanks,
--js

kryyst

I don't know of any that I'd recommend as I've never, nor anyone that I know of has ever used their services. I do know though that generally they are pretty expensive. Though what pretty expensive actually equates to I don't know.

First you may try Norton SystemWorks Professional, it has hard drive recovery tools.

Also check out this site http://www.atl-datarecovery.com/bp.htm
it has data recovery software and the free trial allows you to see what you could recover.

There is other software out there also if you do some searches.

e-nation

i installed BinaryBiz's Virtual Lab on Drive A, and it is able to recover my data!!!!! it shows the NTFS partition EXACTLY the way it is supposed to look! all of the files, all of the directories, and everything appears to be the right size, etc.

only problem here... in order to proceed... BinaryBiz will charge per GIG (or some ratio thereof), and this will cost me $535 to do it!

so, there has got to be a way to do this for free... i mean... it sees everything... all file names, directory names, everything the way i left it. if there was a serious problem, i don't think it would have found all this....

now, question is... how do i do it?... hmmm

kryyst

holy shit that's some big $$$$....ok knowing it's there is a good thing. It may be worth checking out the norton utils they normally are pretty good at recovering data.

Also did you try doing the repair with an XP cd ?

e-nation

i have yet to obtain a copy of NSW

i did try the XP CD, but it doesn't see the windows partition, so Repair isn't an option w/ that route, as far as i can tell... do you have a suggestion on how to approach that?

so far, Virtual Lab is the only thing that is showing the files and directories intact. EasyRecovery Pro (powerquest) found the 87.xx Gigs of data there (just like Virtual Lab), but it categorizes the data into folders for example, MPG, JPG, HTML, etc which apparently leaves it to me to sort them out, which isn't really going to help me from going insane.

any ideas?

kryyst

Hard to say with the xp fix if it's not seeing the folder....did you try doing a manual fix? That may help.

As for your EasyRecovery if it's free and will fix the stuff I'd say go for it.....so what if it puts stuff into folders if it's just media it's easy to sort out anyway.

RBanfield

e-nation, in case you didnt notice I sent you a private mail

e-nation

in order to use easy recovery, i need another 120 gig drive to act as a destination folder, which i do not have.

i'm confident that there is some alternative to Virtual Lab that will also repair my drive. apparently it is the partition table that is messed up. upon one scan that i did (i believe it was Easy Recovery) it was reported that i have a "bad partition table" on sector 10104885 ... does that mean anything to anyone?

ACR's Media Tools Pro looks promising... it's just that i'm more novice than advanced when it comes to this, and i'm a bit scared to proceed... however, it will supposedly allow me to revert back to before any changes that i makes are made. i think this might be my answer. the DOS environment is nonetheless intimidating for me.

any other suggestions before i proceed?

kryyst

Sounds like you are on the right track now. Just read the documentation, pay attention and always double check any comands you are about to send before you hit the enter botton. DOS isn't so bad it can even be your friend. I had assumed it was the partition table from the begininng that's why I was suggesting the winXp recovery since that at times will fix the partion information.

e-nation

i tried Norton System Works. it of course has found an error on the disk. the exact text from Norton is as follows:
error on hard disk = an extended partition is invalid. An extended partition has invalid parameters and is probably inaccessible. correct this situation if you are unable to access partitions on hard disk. do you wish to correct this problem? (end of text)
i've used a utility, FinalData, to scan the disk and it is able to see the files and directories as i left them before i mucked it up w/ BootMagic. my question is-- if i proceed w/ the Norton fix, might it further jeopardize my data, or will it leave it intact?
i appreciate any advice. thanks.

AIM - skellerpalooza

kryyst

Tough call. I would think that it should fix it. BUT it may also just fix the extended partion into the current FAT32 schema in which case you may loose it....

I can only say that if I were faced with the same situation I would let norton try and fix it. However I'd also accept the fact that I may actually loose the data.

It's really a tough call to make and not much more I can offer advice wise for you. Unless you do some searching and try and find a way around the free-trial versions of the other software that is finding the data for you. If you catch my ahem kazaa-lite ahem drift.