anyone know how to recover the FAT?

[statuspending]

hey yas...

i got this little problem.. somehow my file allocation table on one of my data drives(12 gigs worth) got corrupted.....

any idears on how i can recover my fat?

sugar isn't going to help me this time.

thanks



THIS IS HARDCORE

[patrickm]

if one copy of the FAT is still good (there's 2 identical copies, and it's possible that 1 got physically corrupted w/o the other one) it may be possible to recover some or all of your data.

try a program like norton disk doctor or partition magic. it's been a while since i've done this successfully, so someone else might have a better program suggestion. but until you get a better answer, disconnect the drive and don't do anything to it. you want it disturbed as little as possible.

[statuspending]

how would i use partition magic to do this?

when win 98se was on my machine, norton utilites would freeze up all the time. so...all i ahve compatible with my win2000 system now, is partition magic 6.0

er...that is, i have since upgraded from 98se to 2000.

thanks

[patrickm]

i honestly don't remember if we used that or not, it was a few years ago that i did this. and i can't even look into it, since when i upgraded to ME the old version of partition magic doesn't work anymore. i think norton is best for recovery, but if you really run out of options it may be possible to resize the partition slightly and make it create a new FAT. however, that's very risky because there's no guarantee it'll use the right one. and when you do stuff like that, you usually only get one chance, which is why i said to look for a better opinion before jumping into anything.

have you tried running scandisk? i think it can repair out-of-sync FAT's, but not phyically damaged ones. btw, if the FAT is phyically damaged, it's time for a new disk anyway

[cotzrock]

-----------------patrickm wrote:--------------------------
i think norton is best for recovery, but if you really run out of options it may be possible to resize the partition slightly and make it create a new FAT.
----------------------------------------------------------

won't you think partition magic will tell him that his drive's corrupt?

[statuspending]

SCANDISK comes back OK after about 10 sec scan on this 18 gig hard drive. i am goign to check if it's perhaps a termination problem by removing everything else from the scsi bus and booting to linux. linux has better eyes than windows anyways...can read better =)

after that, i will use nero to back up the hdd on 27 cds as it suggests, and then do some more stuff, then restore.

i burned the first of these 27 cds, and nero found data to write to the cd. interesting eh


thanks a lot

[cotzrock]

in 5min search i`ve found several apps with which you can recover the fat but they're all commercial, i'm convinced if you invest some more time, you'll find some share-/ or even freeware! if you don't here`s look here (demo):

http://www.toolsthatwork.com/byte.shtml

yours, ben.

[statuspending]

thanks!

i will certainly give that one a try tonight! i had combed download.com and tried searching yahoo for something, but i didn't get any results like this!

thanks a lot!

steve

[dbman]

at command prompt type fdisk /mbr

[vanillabox]

I would try putting the hard drive into a Windows 2000 machine. I have had several hard dirves go out on some of the computers at my work, and thrown them into the Win2K machine and was able to recover the data. The only thing to do then is have a drive big enough for the data that you are recovering, and REPLACE the damaged drive. Note that in some instances using "fdisk /mbr" can make your computer non-operational so use it with care.

[patrickm]

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
On 2001-07-09 12:04:26, dbman wrote:
at command prompt type fdisk /mbr
</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

that only rerwites the master boot record without formatting the drive, which is useful for wiping out boot viruses but doesn't recover FAT's

[statuspending]

on the suggestion of "fdisk /mbr"

so...i boot to dos with a floppy and run that command?
this sounds ok, but i will probably want to disconnect my active drive and my other data drives when doing this right?

also, hmm... i have to figure out how to load my advansys scsi drivers onto the floppy to get scsi support....or i could even use a different scsi card that it alredy has support for !


thanks everyone!

[Braindrain]

Ok, the same thing happened to me recently. Use Partition Magic to recover it. Of course, all data that was on the FAT will be lost but at least you get your HD space back.

[statuspending]

at least?


that blows!!!

[patrickm]

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
On 2001-07-09 11:16:50, cotzrock wrote:
-----------------patrickm wrote:--------------------------
i think norton is best for recovery, but if you really run out of options it may be possible to resize the partition slightly and make it create a new FAT.
----------------------------------------------------------

won't you think partition magic will tell him that his drive's corrupt?

</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

yeah, or it could read the bad copy and lose further data. that's why i said to do it only as a last resort.

try scandisk /surface (or check 'surface scan' and 'test data and system areas')

can someone else confirm that fdisk/mbr will rebuild the FAT? i still don't think it does that, so it won't solve the problem.

but if you have a dos-mode/real-mode scsi driver, load it with a device="A:\drivername.sys" line in the config.sys file.

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
at least?

that blows!!!
</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

as in "at least you don't have to throw your drive in the garbage can..."

[statuspending]

well,

thanks everyone for your replies.

ya know, i backed up a good portion of all this data on a scsi dds2 tape drive, so i think i will be spending some time trying to recover it from there and just letting the drive's data go.

not the drive though! hehe


thanks everyone!