Computer help needed (hard drives)

[the fat bastid]

i was working on this computer which had a ddo on the hard drive.
i was using fdisk /mbr to get rid of it and it didnt work. i was fooling around with a few more options like /bmbr and what not and after a few tries i noticed that the drive's one partition got set to 2 cyilnders....oh crap. its odd how playing with the master book record can cause that....good ol' computers.

does anyone know of a way to set the partition size back to what it should be with out destorying the data? or is it too late?

my thoughts are that if i do it with fdisk then it will destroy everything.
maybe i can slave it to my main rig and use partition magic in some fashion?

[CRUZTAKER]

Allright Gavin...this is gonna make me look like a.... a something....

WTF is a ddo?

[the fat bastid]

dynamic disk overlay. they are used to get past space limitations in the bios and are loaded in the mbr of the disk. you dont see many anymore, its all legacy stuff. the comp i was working on is a 11 year old 100mhz win95 machine with very important data on it.

ddo or not, right now i care about saving the data.

[CRUZTAKER]

Uhhh....

I forgot that shat a number of brain cells ago.....

If I remember correctly, running fdisk on a disk with data is gonna...well...bye-bye data....

[Logan]

You're toast buddy. :) If you redefined the partitions, say buh-bye to your FAT tables...

[MarauderMark]

You're toast buddy. :) If you redefined the partitions, say buh-bye to your FAT tables...
Ahh unless you have a porchalocka.then reformatting cannafram would be no problem.:up:

[Logan]

But that has nothing to do with the diaphramatic capacitor once the hyper-diode is engaged and the quantum monodiachromes are flowing freely...

Hence you see, he's screwed.

PS - I took the official Star Trek course of completely made up but official sounding tech jargon. Don't mess with me. :D

[alarmguy]

Must be the flux capacitor.

[MarauderMark]

Must be the flux capacitor.
See that. Start talking technical and someone throws in the flux capascitor.:lol:

[BruteForce]

I hear they make lovely bookends.

[jawz101]

you can try going somewhere like www.filesearching.com (http://www.filesearching.com/) & search for Hiren as in 'hiren's boot cd'.

There are a lot of utils including mbr editors. Good luck with that though.

I'd recommend trying slaving the hard drive and trying something like Stellar Phoenix FAT & NTFS (http://www.stellarinfo.com/). It has options to read corrupt partitions and such. I haven't used it much but I hear it's good.

The more you mess with your drive though the more chances you're overwriting data. It's best to get it slaved and work on it from there w/ possibly forensics/data recovery sw. I'd rather start over though.

[1stMerc]

If you have the original disk manager software, you should be able to restore the harddrive from backup which most DDO software creates when you first set it up. If you want to try and retrieve data, do not use fdisk or it will truely be FUBAR.

[the fat bastid]

Luckly i was able to save the part using active partition recovery from Hiren's cd. The smart move was seeing that it was messed up and stopping instead of playing around and possibly overwriting the data somemore, as jawz101 said.

next up. this old drive with ddo is now on new controller card. the ddo is undded and doesnt load correctly anymore. how can i uninstall it? fdisk /mbr just restores the ddo. its an old quantum fireball. i checked quantum's site and they seem to deney they ever made drives in the first place. no downloads or anything. i find out maxtor bought them and maxblast should support all quantums as well. i download that, boot from it from a floopy. and the 'uninstall ddo' option is grayed out. oh good.

any ideas from the peanut gallery?

[MarauderMark]

Hey Gavin..
I was wondering if youv've ever seen the movie "Prasila(more than likely spelled wrong) queen of the dessert" .i'll tell ya when i saw this movie it kinda changed it for me about Zod and the actor Terence Stamp and Mr Smith from Matrix.:eek: .

[jawz101]

Are you sure you're on the right forums:)

Have you tried putting it in a machine that recognizes a larger sized drive? According to your explaination of the pc bios having size limitations of readable drives, why don't you just slave it in a different machine and pull data off?

My suggestion: goto other pc and download shareaza, emule or some file sharing app. Download that Stellar Phoenix sw. slave hd on other machine and try that. Delete Stellar when done.

Or try more free tools:
ultimate boot cd (http://www.ubcd4win.com/)
disk investigator (http://www.theabsolute.net/sware/dskinv.html)
dfsee (http://www.dfsee.com/dfsee.htm)

that disk investigator looks cool

[CRUZTAKER]

Have you tried putting it in a machine that recognizes a larger sized drive?

Good point.
As long as the drive is still alive. There is chance of recovery.

If all else fails...you could take it to a professional data recovery facility.:nono:

[jawz101]

ewww... professional recovery can be mucho $$$

[grzellmer]

The ddo, as mentioned, holds the relationship of the various sectors of the hard drive that store a file when the motherboard/OS is incapable of accessing the entire drive. When the ddo is wiped out you are indeed in trouble. However, if the data hasn't been overwritten, IT IS STILL ON THE DRIVE!!

If it were mine I would execute the following steps.
1) Do not try to rebuild the ddo. It just builds a new map. Not much help in rebuilding the files.
2) Add the drive as a secondary drive to a more up to date computer. Do not write any data to the drive. Read only.
3) Then use a data recovery package to see what you can pull off the drive. There are drive recovery packages that are capable of scanning the drive and rebuilding the data files. I would search the net for a package or one like this "http://www.stellarinfo.com/disk-recovery.htm"

Good Luck

Z

[Breadfan]

FYI Quantum's hdd division was bought by Maxtor. They may now host the tools for the older Quantum drives.

So do you have a spare drive sitting around? You could ghost the data partitions to a spare drive, get rid of the ddo on the one the data came from and then restore the ghost image to that drive.

Been awhile since I've undid ddo's, usually whoever's disk manager you used would be able to undo it though...MaxBlast from Maxtor may be able to work with the Quantum drive...then again Maxtor may not support them, even though their drives are based very heavily on Quantum's design.