englandr@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Scott Englander) (09/27/88)
In article <26222@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> hullp@cogsci.berkeley.edu ( ) writes: >After entering "KEYBOARD.SYS" in my CONFIG.SYS file, my hard drive >has been completely inaccessible. I can now only boot up from a >floppy and both DOS commands, Norton Utilities, and PCTOOLS tell me >I have no hard drive on my system and consequently don't allow me >access to it. >I assume the FAT's are destroyed. I have vital (unbacked-up) data >on the disk. How can I recover it? I have a MiniScribe 8438 that just went bad (General Read Error) under warranty. The supplier replaced it, but i lost a month of data. So i called MiniScribe, and they referred me to OnTrack Data Recovery Inc. in Eden Prairie Minn., 800/752-1333 (Susan). I called them and this is the deal: You sign a contract and pay them $200 up front for a diagnosis. Then they call you with an estimate of what it will cost to recover the data. She told me that they have very high success rates, and if the amount of data is small, they'll include it in the $200. Otherwise you pay according to how much there is to recover. I'll post here again after i've had some experience with them. -- - Scott
jcmorris@mitre-bedford.ARPA (Joseph C. Morris) (09/30/88)
In a recent article hullp@cogsci.berkeley.edu writes: > I can now only boot up from a >floppy and both DOS commands, Norton Utilities, and PCTOOLS tell me >I have no hard drive on my system and consequently don't allow me >access to it. > >I assume the FAT's are destroyed. I have vital (unbacked-up) data >on the disk. How can I recover it? Assuming that the problem isn't in the hardware, DOS and friends aren't using the FAT to see if they will admit to the presence of a hard disk. Instead, the test is the presence of the necessary signatures in the partition table and any partitions marked as 'DOS'. Blow away any of these and you've lost the use of the disk. If the problem is that someone has scribbled over the partition table but left the DOS partition itself intact, you can get back everything except the last physical cylinder of the disk by using FDISK and Norton utilities (AE only, I think): 1. Run FDISK, which should admit that the fixed disk exists even if nobody else will. I expect that it will deny that you have any DOS partitions. 2. Define a one-cylinder partition on the highest cylinder on the disk. This will cause the first several clusters on that cylinder to be over-written with a boot block, FAT, and "root" directory. BTW, if you run FDISK and tell it to define a standard (full-pack) partition, you've just wiped out the root directory and both copies of the FAT. In this case, unless you've recently run Norton's SD or something similar, you aren't likely to get your data back. 3. Reboot the system. You should now have a (very small) hard disk which can be manipulated with normal DOS commands. 4. Run Norton Utilities to edit the partition table, changing it to cover the entire disk. Watch out for the parameter which says what type of FAT you have; you'll probably have to change it (space bar) from DOS-12 to DOS-16. 5. Reboot again. You should have your disk back, and can now start to see if the FAT and/or root directory have been clobbered. Remember to question any file which has an allocation chain which runs through the last cylinder on the disk. Good luck.