Dynamic Disk Unreadable - Help!

[Javic]

I've just had a 120GB drive with about 100GB of data on it all of a sudden become "Unreadable". After a little research, and about 6 hours of trying to recover it, I've given up, admitted defeat, and I'm looking for some help!

This is what Microsoft's Management Console Help Section states:

<font color=green>"The disk is not accessible. The disk may have experienced hardware failure, corruption, or I/O errors. The disk's copy of the system's disk configuration database may be corrupted. An error icon appears on disks that display the Unreadable status. Both dynamic and basic disks display the Unreadable status.

Disks may display the Unreadable status while they are spinning up or when Disk Management is rescanning all of the disks on the system. In some cases, an unreadable disk has failed and is not recoverable. For dynamic disks, the Unreadable status usually results from corruption or I/O errors on part of the disk, rather than failure of the entire disk. You can rescan the disks (using the Rescan Disks command) or reboot the computer to see if the disk status changes."</font color=green>


Ok, so something's screwed up. I then tried to find out what was screwed up and how I can fix it. I found this in Microsoft's Knowledge Base:

<A HREF="http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q236086" target="_new"> System or Boot Disk Listed as Dynamic Unreadable in Disk Management (Q236086) </A>

Now I tried doing what they say there, but they basically say fat chance with a Dynamic Disk. This not an OS disk, so I figured I might have a little better luck, but no dice.

I also tried switching around IDE channels, master/slave/solo. I also tried putting it into another W2K machine and it still said "Unreadable"

So I now have two questions for the vast wealth of knowledge and experience that is THG's Forum.

1. Have any of you ever experienced this and did you ever recover the drive without formatting? If so what steps did you take?

2. Dynamic or Basic disks? After experiencing this problem, I'm thinking to personally stay away from Dynamic Disks, because I really don't use the additional features of them. And from experiencing this there seems to be alot of recovery features that you can't do to Dynamic disks that you can to Basic. What are your opinions/preferences?

Again, many many thanks in advance!

-Javic

 

[4Ryan6]

It sounds like you're going to have to use a file recovery program to salvage what you can off the drive, you'll need an up and running machine that you can hook your drive to as a secondary drive and run the recovery program from the good machines drive, preferably with a CDRW installed to send your files to, or a hardrive large enough on the recovery machine to accept the recovered files. You can find and download the recovery program from www.bootdisk.com hope this helps you. CAUTION make sure you test the files you recover with some kind of Virus program to make sure you're not recovering a virus that could have caused everything in the first place, and you can also get that from bootdisk.com.

You never know what you can do until you try.

 

[Javic]

Thanks for the tip! I checked out <A HREF="http://www.BootDisk.com" target="_new">BootDisk.com</A> and the only thing I saw there that might help is "Drive Rescue". Unfortunately this is what they say about NTFS drives:

<i>
NTFS... Does Drive Rescue support NTFS?
The latest version of Drive Rescue can rescue from NTFS. But currently, there are only the 'undelete' and 'find lost drive' functions available. 'Find lost data' and NTFS raw data recovery will be supported in the near future.
</i>

Is there any other rescue program that you think might help me? I'm still going to give DriveRescue a try, but it would be nice to have a few different ones to try so I can sit down and do this all at once.

Thanks!
-Javic

 

[4Ryan6]

Go to zdnet.com In the downloads section do a search for File Recovery in the Windows section, look for the program, PC Inspector File Recovery Vs. 3.0.1 Its a free program and it works with Fat 12/16/32 and NTSF files, it looks like exactly what you need.

You never know what you can do until you try.

 

[Javic]

Thanks again! I did however check out the website (haven't tried the program yet) and it said this...

<i>Finds partitions automatically, even if the boot sector or FAT has been erased or damaged <b>(does not work with the NTFS file system)</b></i>

...so it might now work because my drives are NTFS. I will give it a try and let everyone know how it went!

Much Appreciated!
-Javic