"No volume information" error. Help!

S

SlimPickens

n00b
Joined
Sep 28, 2004
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Greetings. I'm running WinXPpro and have a 250G Maxtor drive partitioned into two logical drives. This drive does not have the OS on it. I can't access the drive and get error messages like Subject Line above and "Unable to determine volume version and state." and "Bad file record signature". I've tried various tools like aVast, Partition Magic, chkdsk with no joy. Is this drive truly hosed or can I recover this information and save the data? What do you think? TIA. Regards.
 
Does your drive show up as operational in device manager as well as disk management*? If so, meaning that the OS recognizes the drive, then the partition table or file allocation table is likely hosed, and in that case, your best bet will be to consider what you have on the drive and its value Based on that value, you may be interested in using data recovery tools, of which I would recommend Runtime's GetDataBack.


*To access the device manager, select the system applet from the control panel and tab to "hardware". The Device manager may be launched by clicking hte appropriate button. To access isk management, select computer management from administrative tools in the control panel, and then expand the disk management tree.
 
If all else fails....as a LAST RESORT to getting your data....

You can wrap the drive in a plastic bag, and stick it in the freezer overnight. Then hook it up to the computer. Theres a 50/50 chance that you'll get one last use out of it, which should be used to quickly backup any critical data.

Someone else can explain why this works, but trust me it really does, I (and several people I know) have done it with success many times. I think it has something to do with condensing the heads on the something or other.

Don't ask me, I'm not a hardware guy :D just software.
 
The freezer trick is for the click of death (tick-tick-tick-tick, stop). It has has to do with shrinkage of the mechanical components due to the cold, actually the plastic bag is to prevent condensation.

This should probably be moved to the data storage sub, but check out Ice Czar's FAQ
 
Good call, M11. DL-ed the Bart PE plug-in for GetDataBack. Ran it and prepared to copy my files off the drive. BUT...I need to buy it first. I would have appreciated a little heads up from the company on their plug-in before 5 hours of prep and processing. I'm looking at fixing the partition table using PowerQuest partition info and its partition editor. I'm a little leary. Do you know of any other software to repair the partition table on a secondary drive? TIA. Regards.
 
So, I bought GetDataBack and am moving everything off the drive onto another. I would have rather somehow repaired the version/type information but this will do. I'll then re-format and maybe go with one large partition. Thanks, all, for your input. Take care. Regards.
 
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