Hello
Recently I had something go wrong with my PC, the FAT of a 40G partition holding all my photos has become corrupted, other partitions in this HDD (primary, slave) seem unaffected.
I had a backup but intially thought the problem was the OS gone down and, acting in a rush, it appears I ghosted the image of the OS over the backup instead of drive C. YES I know I have probably called myself all the names you are now calling me.
I am not familiar with recovery software and am actually hoping to take the HDD to someone I know that works with computers to get him to have a look at the HDD and hopefully copy the backup FAT that should exist onto and over the corrupted FAT.

However it is proving hard to get hold of this chap and I noticed that symantec ghost 7.0, run off a floppy at boot, seems able to see the directory tree on the 'lost' partition. I have only looked down/up the directory tree to the 2nd layer of directories but the structure seems to be there. If I can't get hold of this chap can I use ghost 7.0 ( bundled with a Biostar MB) to copy either the directory tree and jpegs etc or just the actually jpegs etc to another HDD or partition?
Would such an attempt endanger the files/directories/jpegs etc? I ask as I now beleive that the actual information is intact, just not accessable via windows. Any attempt by me to recover them that might endanger them would be unwise if I can simply leave it to a 'pro' in complete safety.

DOS run of a floppy at boot can not access the affected partition but can see and seemingly access the other partitions. XP too sees the other partitions of the affected HDD and can seemingly access them though I am very 'unkeen' to allow this HDD to be 'booted' by XP incase XP attempts to correct the FAT and totally messes things up.

If I can use ghost 7.0 to copy the files, can someone please talk me through the proceedure? However please bare in mind that you are talking to a relative novice here, or should that be a numpty head, so please keep it simple and largely jargon free.

Please note, the files/directories etc are the real files and directories, NOT ghosted images of them.

Thank you

Thanks Night Owl, a Gerry Rafferty fan perhaps? I will have a read of "Guide to Norton Ghost" later today.
With regard to your questions
The OS was on Primary master on a 6G partition, the rest of the space on that HDD was allocated as a 2nd partition. There was/is some files and bits and pieces on there that are irrelevant.
The lost partition was on the primary slave HDD, I have a ghost image of the OS stored on/in another partition of that primary slave HDD.
The backup of the photos was a partition on a 3 HDD which was set up as secondary slave. Secondary master being a CD drive. This backup was a literal copy of all the photos on the 'lost partition'.
As I said I was is a rush after the crash and thinking the crash had been a hiccup in the OS I meant to ghost a fresh copy of the OS from the ghost image onto the active partition on primary master but seemingly my lack of attention lead to the image being ghosted onto the partition that held the backup photos. Whatever happened I was left with a copy of the OS on my backup partition with the original OS still on drive C.

The ghost proceedure I think I used was the std "ghost from an image" where you select the image and target.


Ghost 7.0 under DOS at boot seems able to see and read the contents of the partition that NEITHER DOS nor Windows XP can see or read. I didnt want to press my luck seeing what ghost could see so I only went in as far as the second layer of directories or files but of what I did see it seems that ghost 7 can see the directory structure as it existed before the problem arose.
Both DOS and Window XP can see and seemingly read the contents of the OTHER partitions on the HDD with this 'dodgy' partition though the "file names" are longer than the 8 or whatever characters that a "dir X:" commad in DOS will show.

I found out that ghost can 'see' the contents of the lost partiton when I thought "lets see if I can see the partition" during the process where you select the image you which to ghost back to whereever.



With regard to the following
"DOS Ghost in DOS can not work at the *file* and *directory* level.  The smallest unit that Ghost works with is a *partition*--which can be copied *partition-to-partition* (cloned), saved to an image file, and restored from an image file. "


so, if I made an image of this dodgy partition that ghost can seemingly see and saved that image somewhere else, I might then be able to restore that image to another somewhere with that restored image possibly being functional, ie working. OR would ghost also copy the dodgy FAT?


Thanks

Night owl, re the Night owl/Gerry Rafferty question, Night Owl was the title of about the only album/LP of his I have and it just made me wonder.

Re the problem, you make the comment that it may not be the FAT and that

"there must be some other change that is blocking access--maybe the partition is *hidden* for some reason--or the partition *type* (file system designation?) got changed so Windows and DOS are not allowed access"

that's an interesting point.
One of the error messages I have seen about this partition was something about the FAT being bad, I cant remember exactly what or where I saw that message. BUT if I remember correctly when I first booted the computer and this problem occurred,  I think XP ran scandisk or chkdsk or whatever the disk checking programme is called and I seem to remember seeing something about a non recognised type of partition or file system.
The file system is/was/should-be FAT32.

What was happening when the problem occurred?
I normally have my hard disks in cold swap (swap when the computer is off) caddies. The Primary master stays in the computer all the time in its caddy but I swap primary slaves about. The affected HDD is a 250G Seagate, any other primary slave HDD's are normally 20G of various makes. I had just swapped the primary slave caddies and put the 250G HDD in and the computer booted with this error. That I remember there was no problem with the shut down before I last removed 250G HDD but I think there was a hiccup in the shutdown before the swap, ie the shut down to allow me to put the 250G into the computer, I had left a notepad or text document open and unsaved and had to save it during shut down.

About the computer, from the size of the 20G HDD's mentioned I assume you would guess they are 'old' but they are seemingly sound. The 250G HDD, MB and CPU etc are maybe 18months old. The affected partition holds probably 4000 to 6000 digital camera photos and 35mm negative scans which total probably 20-30G  with most of the digital camera images being 2-3 Mb each.
I also have an old copy of Windows Works, 4.0, on the PC and it seems a bit tempremental. It tends to crash, whilst using spread sheets, if I do a search immediately after I have done a save, I normally have to high light 2 or 3 cells in succession after the save before I can use the search, ctr F. The spread sheets are primarily on the affected partition though the same problem happens with out of date versions of these spread sheets on the 2nd partition of the primary master. I dont store 'data' on drive C.
T
he ghosting an image of the dodgy partition onto another partition sounds like way to go and I will give that a shot if I can a HDD big enough or space in one of the 250G's partitions.

One other thing (as I casually drop in a possible bomb shell), the 250G HDD has always run warm but after the problem I noticed that the fan in the caddy holding the 250G HDD had failed and the HDD was hot.
Thanks
Sean

seanmckinney

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Heats usually not a good thing for HDD's--but....the HDD seems to be working okay otherwise.

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Well, XP runs a quick scan on each boot--if an error flag is set for a given HDD during its last use--then the system goes through a more complete scan on the next boot if that quick scan sees the *dirty bit* flag set.  So, it appears that an error was seen by the system on the last use of that HDD which caused WinXP to run that more thorough scan on boot when the HDD was again on the system.

Trouble shooting a HDD with important data on it is always a risk--if something goes wrong, well, matters just get worse.  If it's at all possible, creating a copy of the data and using the copy to trouble shoot is the safest way to go.

You can possibly start Ghost with a switch that forces Ghost to ignore *bad clusters*--the switch is *-fro*.  So start Ghost at the command line with:  ghost.exe -fro.

If that allows Ghost to work with the data on that partition, now you could either attempt cloning directly disk-to-disk *Local > Partition > to Partition*, or first create an image file *Local > Partition >to Image*--and then restoring that image to another HDD *Local > Partition > from Image*.

With the data on a different HDD, you can then remove the original (thus protecting it), and then perform various repairs on the *copy*.

There are programs that can attempt to fix *bad clusters*--WinXP's chkdsk is one such program--but, it appears that it did not work when you first booted--because you have lost access to the partition--and the bad clusters are still there!  But, it is the first line of troubleshooting:   How to perform disk error checking in Windows XP

Let us know how things are going!

seanmckinney

Thanks for the report back--glad to hear you have had success recovering your data!

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Sounds like a good, careful tech!