I had a friend who suffered a crash and was unable to boot. She was a bit frantic as she had a single (160GB) drive system and it wouldn’t even boot. Fortunately i had just read a review of FileScavenger and thought it would be worth a try. I had her ship the drive to me and installed it in a portable USB enclosure. I installed the program, plugged the drive in and set it to work. A long, drawn out process, but i managed to save all her data (about 80GB of mp3s and photos). Program costs US$50, but well worth it in my opinion. Take a gander at quetek.
When this happened to me many years ago I took my drive to a “data recovery specialist”. Needless to say the FAT had become corrupted and the partition was pretty badly fragmented. So, $2000 later, with no usable data recovered, I was a little wiser.
If the information on the drive is important enough to you, you may need to resort to some professional help (and I hope your experience is better than mine was) .
I have used Stellar Phoenix product to recover my data. You can try partition recovery software. This software helps you out to recover all your data. This software has GUI interface and very easy to use. It demo version is free through which you can check software recovery capability.
Disk letters in Windows/DOS are assigned to partitions, not physical drives. They are assigned (approximately) in the order
/dev/hda1 = c:
/dev/hdb1 = d:
/dev/hda2 = e:
and so on, but hidden partitions can affect the assignment, as can many other factors (like OS). These are not hard and fast rules, and looking at the contents and labels is more important when determining where data resides.
Now you realize the futility of setting up multiple partitions on a drive. There is no point in doing so in modern PC’s unless you plan to set up multiple OS’s.
I too had problems booting with the damaged drive into windows. uckily my drive was SATA, not IDE so I could hot plug it in AFTER booting into windows. That worked like a charm. Putting it into a USB enclosure might or might not work, it’s going to depend on the enclosure.
Oh, and of course, always backup your data! I just learned this the hard way (and there is a BBQ post to prove it).
If you have to go the professional recovery way, maybe try these guys: http://www.aerodr.com/ They charge a flat $290 fee. All the other quotes I got ranged into the thousands of dollars which was ridiculous.
I can’t stress this enough, have a backup plan in your home.
I ended up getting 3 1 TB drives ($90 each). 1 went into my main PC. I have all out pictures and videos, programs, etc, in there. The other two I put in a D-link NAS enclosure ($120) on a RAID 1 (mirror). I use Acronis True Image to backup my computers into the NAS every week. I should have done that a long time ago.
I am not sure how you conclude this.
There can be some good technical reasons for partitioning disks. The best is protecting the OS partition from being filled up by some process that uses disk space. I use my PC for recording - I can spool huge audio files to disk in a short space of time. I use a separate partition for this so that I don’t fill the System drive so full that I cannot boot the system. I can run out of space in the recording partition, but the OS is protected. Similar disk usage issues can occur with video editing/transcoding. Isolating the user data from the OS can also be a good technique for reliability and safety.
Of course, a really flexible disk management system (say Linux Volume Management) is capable of modifying and reconfiguring disks and partitions while protecting data and staying functional. My favourite was rebuilding and extending the system disk mirror on my home server having replaced the disks one at a time, and finishing the expansion while logged in remotely over a vpn.
Again, in a MODERN PC with a MODERN OS this is not a problem. In fact, just lat week, when recovering my old data from the afore mentioned toast drive, I filled up my OS disk to capacity. I had no problem booting into the OS.
Can you give me an example? I can’t think of one. And it certainly did no good for the OP.
I’m still of the mind (and a google search seems to imply that a lot of tech sites agree with me) that in a modern PC, it is nothing more than a waste of time.
I’ve dealt with Windows 2003 Servers that have run out of disk space on the system drive - they sometimes fail to boot cleanly. XP can be difficult in this situation too. I don’t use Vista and I am not prepared to crash my wife’s laptop to test it. Linux does boot fine with a full boot/system volume.
The OP may have had a serious physical disk failure - we don’t know. And user data isolation is used for most corporate PC builds - the OS can be redeployed (in the case of failure) without the user losing profile and local data. And I have worked on corporate builds professionally for many years. It works.
Well, all I have is plenty of practical (professional) experience in recovering data off failed systems of all types. File systems fail (including NTFS, FAT32, EXT2, EXT3), sometimes catastrophically, and the busiest partition (usually the system partition) is most likely to go. If the disk is sensibly partitioned then user data is not on that partition and is less likely to require recovery.
Even when a physical failure occurs on a disk of the failed block type, other partitions where the error has not occurred can be recovered more easily than the one with the error.
The only time multiple partitions gets more difficult is when the actual partition table gets trashed and the backup partition table is also unavailable. Then you need to use a full disk scan to find the file systems to rebuild the partition table before data recovery. But with a big single disk partition you may need to scan the whole disk to rebuild the file system anyhow.