The saga continues:
Some of you will remember MLII from my previous episodes. For those uninitiated, MLII is a Maxtor MaxLine II hard drive with a capacity of 250GB.
MLII is a backup drive, and was formatted with an extended partition containing two 119GB (after formatting overhead) FAT32 partitions (drive H: and drive I
in the hopes that my older USB2 drive enclosure would be able to address the higher sectors if they appeared as two separate drives (it could not).
Yesterday I purchased a new enclosure (Bytecc ME-320U2F) which claims to support hard drives up to 300GB. It offers both USB2.0 and 1394a connectivity. I installed the drive and plugged and fired up the enclosure using the USB interface. All seemed well. Both partitions showed up and all my data was accessible. I then unmounted the drive and tried it with the Firewire connection, just for kicks (my Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2 v.2 has Firewire onboard). XP detected it and mounted the volumes. I took this opportunity to run EasyRecovery Pro on the H: and see if I could recover some files I deleted by accident. When ERP presented me with a selection of drives, MLII's first partition was not on the list. I thought that rather odd, as I: was listed. I checked My Computer and lo and behold! H: was listed with no details. When I tried to access the drive I was greeted with "The disk in drive H is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?"
I removed the drive from the enclosure and popped it back into my box to confirm that the problem was not due to contoller malfunction. It is not. Since then I've used every free and demo software recovery and partition repair application I could find but nothing seems to be able to fix the partition.
A few insights:
• Active@ Partition Recovery v 3.0 (a DOS-based app) can see the damaged partition and lets me navigate the folders but it cannot access the data. I "fixed" the partition using APR but Windows still could not access H:, so I went back and unded the changes.
• Active Undelete is not able to find the partitions (which is strange considering it comes from the same minds that wrote Active Partition Recovery).
• Easy Recovery Pro was unable to see any files or folders on the drive, except in Raw Recovery mode, which is effectively useless for me in this case. Unusual because it's often the most capable recovery software around.
• Partition Magic 8 sees two partitions but lists drive H: as unformatted.
• I'm going to try the demo version of Active Uneraser and see if it can do anything.
For all this work I still don't know where the problem lies. Is it the drive's MBR? The partition table for drive H:?
I'm open to your suggestions.
Piyono
Some of you will remember MLII from my previous episodes. For those uninitiated, MLII is a Maxtor MaxLine II hard drive with a capacity of 250GB.
MLII is a backup drive, and was formatted with an extended partition containing two 119GB (after formatting overhead) FAT32 partitions (drive H: and drive I
in the hopes that my older USB2 drive enclosure would be able to address the higher sectors if they appeared as two separate drives (it could not).Yesterday I purchased a new enclosure (Bytecc ME-320U2F) which claims to support hard drives up to 300GB. It offers both USB2.0 and 1394a connectivity. I installed the drive and plugged and fired up the enclosure using the USB interface. All seemed well. Both partitions showed up and all my data was accessible. I then unmounted the drive and tried it with the Firewire connection, just for kicks (my Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2 v.2 has Firewire onboard). XP detected it and mounted the volumes. I took this opportunity to run EasyRecovery Pro on the H: and see if I could recover some files I deleted by accident. When ERP presented me with a selection of drives, MLII's first partition was not on the list. I thought that rather odd, as I: was listed. I checked My Computer and lo and behold! H: was listed with no details. When I tried to access the drive I was greeted with "The disk in drive H is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?"
I removed the drive from the enclosure and popped it back into my box to confirm that the problem was not due to contoller malfunction. It is not. Since then I've used every free and demo software recovery and partition repair application I could find but nothing seems to be able to fix the partition.
A few insights:
• Active@ Partition Recovery v 3.0 (a DOS-based app) can see the damaged partition and lets me navigate the folders but it cannot access the data. I "fixed" the partition using APR but Windows still could not access H:, so I went back and unded the changes.
• Active Undelete is not able to find the partitions (which is strange considering it comes from the same minds that wrote Active Partition Recovery).
• Easy Recovery Pro was unable to see any files or folders on the drive, except in Raw Recovery mode, which is effectively useless for me in this case. Unusual because it's often the most capable recovery software around.
• Partition Magic 8 sees two partitions but lists drive H: as unformatted.
• I'm going to try the demo version of Active Uneraser and see if it can do anything.
For all this work I still don't know where the problem lies. Is it the drive's MBR? The partition table for drive H:?
I'm open to your suggestions.
Piyono
