I recently did a fresh install of Vista Ultimate 64, I had 2 sata drives, 1 40gb which is just a quick system drive and a 2nd 250gb drive that was just storage. Previously both of these drives ran fine under XP.
After the install I attempted to navigate to the 250gb drive, but it wasn't there (showed up fine in bios) from there I went straight for the Disk Management MMC. Once there I noticed that my disk was listed offline, right clicking on it and choosing reactivate met with an error.
Quote:
"The attempted operation is invalid. Either the parameters specified are
invalid or the operation cannot be completed on the selected object. Refer
to the Disk Management Help for assistance on the correct use of the
attempted operation"
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After much fussing around with diskpart at the CLI, I began my search on the web and finally came across this gem of a tool.
TestDisk - CGSecurity
After stepping through the menus I learned that the number of cylinders being reported was incorrect. Telling it to write the new results and 1 reboot later my drive is back.
This utility does a ton of things and is available on most platforms.
Below is an excerpt from their site:
Quote:
TestDisk is OpenSource software and is licensed under the terms of the GNU Public License (GPL).
TestDisk is a powerful free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.
TestDisk can- Fix partition table, recover deleted partition
- Recover FAT32 boot sector from its backup
- Rebuild FAT12/FAT16/FAT32 boot sector
- Fix FAT tables
- Rebuild NTFS boot sector
- Recover NTFS boot sector from its backup
- Fix MFT using MFT mirror
- Locate ext2/ext3 Backup SuperBlock
TestDisk has features for both novices and experts. For those who know little or nothing about data recovery techniques, TestDisk can be used to collect detailed information about a non-booting drive which can then be sent to a tech for further analysis. Those more familiar with such procedures should find TestDisk a handy tool in performing onsite recovery.
Operating systems
TestDisk can run under- DOS (either real or in a Windows 9x DOS-box),
- Windows (NT4, 2000, XP, 2003),
- Linux,
- FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD,
- SunOS and
- MacOS
Source files and precompiled binary executables are available for DOS, Win32, MacOSX and Linux from the download page
Filesystems
TestDisk can find lost partitions for all of these file systems:- BeFS ( BeOS )
- BSD disklabel ( FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD )
- CramFS, Compressed File System
- DOS/Windows FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32
- HFS, HFS+ and HFSX, Hierarchical File System
- JFS, IBM's Journaled File System
- Linux ext2 and ext3
- Linux LUKS encrypted partition
- Linux RAID md 0.9/1.0/1.1/1.2
- RAID 1: mirroring
- RAID 4: striped array with parity device
- RAID 5: striped array with distributed parity information
- RAID 6: striped array with distributed dual redundancy information
- Linux Swap (versions 1 and 2)
- LVM and LVM2, Linux Logical Volume Manager
- Mac partition map
- Novell Storage Services NSS
- NTFS ( Windows NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008 )
- ReiserFS 3.5, 3.6 and 4
- Sun Solaris i386 disklabel
- Unix File System UFS and UFS2 (Sun/BSD/...)
- XFS, SGI's Journaled File System
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