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damaged / lost volume header

janimal

n00b
Joined
Oct 13, 2005
Messages
11
i think i've lost the header to one of my internal disks ( maxtor 160gb). this is a storage only disk, and contains no software but regularly accessed files. after a system reboot, the disk name was magically reset to 'local disk', and the file system changed from ntfs to raw. whenever i try to access the disk in any way, windows simply prompts me to format the disk. the disk is otherwise fine in winxp and bios, though apparently unformatted. foolishly, the data is not backed up (waiting till i can afford a server), so one way or another i want to recover it. i have tried to diagnose the disk in norton disk doctor, only to be told that the disk contains no recognisable format. i've tried the disk investigator app, but it pretty much just tells me there's nothing on the disk. i have also, on advice, run fdisk /mbr on the disk to no apparent effect. is there a convenient way to recover the disk header or do i have to recover the data to a secondary location using recovery software? i'd rather not have to resort to the latter, as there is about 100gb of data, and i don't have enough contiguous space on my system. should i try to create a disk image before i continue?
 
i have stellar phoenix fat/ntfs, which has got me out of trouble before, and works fine. trouble is, as i understand it, that for any of these recovery apps, you need a secondary location to recover your data to. with the 100bg of data i need to recover, and all the deleted files i'm bound to pick up as well, i could end up needing around 150gb of space which i don't have. it will also take forever because of the volume of data. what i was hoping was that as it appears to be the disk volume header thats the problem and because i didn't physically go in and format the disk, that there might be an alternative to a full recovery process which bypasses all that moving around of data.
 
i bit the bullet in the end and bought another disk to recover the data to.
stellar phoenix crashed every time i tried to scan the disk, ontrack found all
the data, but none of the volume or file names (nice), but r-studio did the deed
and successfully recovered the entire directory structure and around 99.8% of the files.
 
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