Lost all drives in extended DOS partition?

[bevills1]

Recently I lost all logical drives in extended DOS partition when PC spontaneously restarted while creating DVD image file using Nero Image Recorder. A few months ago I had exact same result when I opened DVD burner while running DVDShrink on some files created by DVDDecrypter on the hard drive, i.e. that also resulted in spontaneous reboot and loss of all logical drives in the extended DOS partition. These 2 separate instances occurred on 2 separate systems with different DVD burners with both systems running Windows 2000 SP4 and latest updates and 512 MB of memory. Has anybody experienced such odd behavior related to DVD burning activity? I might avoid possible recurrence of the first instance simply by not opening the drive while any DVD process is running, but I have no clue what caused the latest incident in which reboot seemed to have no explanation.

[Krispy Kritter]

Have you checked the system logs in the Event viewer? It should show the error(s).

[bevills1]

Subsequent to restoring drives in extended DOS partition, the primary DOS partition was lost making check of any log files impossible, and drives in extended DOS partition were lost twice since then. Similar occurrences on identical 160 GB drive turned out to be a bad drive that was RMAed to Western Digital, and it appears same is now indicated here. The 2 Western Digital drives were purchased at the same time leading me to believe they must have had a bad batch of hard drives.

[Krispy Kritter]

I've had similar issues in the past which were the result of a faulty IDE controller. After swapping in various drives (both known good drives and new drives) the problem continued to happen. Replacing the IDE controller solved the problem. (This occured while using a PCI addon controller card).

[bevills1]

Mine is connected to the Mobo IDE connection. I'm guessing that means replacing the Mobo if further problems continue, or do you think a BIOS update could help if that's the issue? Is there a way to test the IDE controller to verify whether it's bad or not?

[AlanHK]

I had a similar problem when Windows crashed hard and scrambled a disk's MBR.

After several months of trying various applications, I found a free utility that was able to rebuild it and I got my data back.

Try testdisk: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk.

When you run it, you select the disk, then it analyses it, which may take a couple of hours. It then presents you with a proposed layout (eg, disk 1: 20 GB, disk 2: 4 GB...) and if it looks like what it should be, you okay it and it writes the paritition table.

[bevills1]

On the most recent crash I just happened to be watching and for a split second saw a message which said something about a protection error. This lead me to conclude it may be an improper setting or corrupt files in Windows which are simply recreated when the Ghost image is restored, and I decided to do a fresh Windows install instead of recreating partition from Ghost image. Only time will tell, but no more problems for a couple of days now.