RAID problem- partition turned to FAT12?

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[]i9

Gawd
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Nov 9, 2001
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I was recently doing a hardware upgrade, and screwed up my striping RAID array.

I went to repair a Windows XP install and didn't get the RAID driver in right. I have 2 80 gig SATA drives partitioned into a 40 gig and a 120 gig partition.

The 40 gig had the Windows install on it.

I installed XP onto another drive so that I could try to recover my data.
The 120 gig partition is fine. All of the data on it is intact and in good shape. However the 40 gig partion is showing up as a FAT12 partition. XP claims that it is only a 10mg partition instead of its true 40gig.

I ran 'Recover Files' but it only found a couple of gibberish files, and it also claims its a 10 mg drive. But Easeus Partition Manager shows it as the 40 gig partition it is, but as FAT12.

Ive also tried the data recovery programs on the UBCD but nothing is making a difference.

I was wondering if anyone here might have any ideas? If I were to use Easeus to merge the two partitions, would it overwrite the data, or would it maybe reconvert the 40gig back to NTFS?

Thanks in advance
 
Well for starters....I would backup immediately what is on your 120gb partition if its worth anything to you.
Secondly IDK WTF FAT12????
Your Windows partition is probably just totally screwed so If you had anything important I would try to back it up but it sounds like its too late.
I would do a clean install on the 40gb partition with the right raid drivers...just get a Gparted iso and boot from it to delete the FAT12 partition and make a 40gb NTFS partition. hopefully your 120gb partition will remain intact, but like I said I would back it up before trying this.
 
This initial version of FAT is now referred to as FAT12. Designed as a file system for floppy diskettes, it limited cluster addresses to 12-bit values, which not only limited the cluster count to 4078,[7] but made FAT manipulation tricky with the PC's 8-bit and 16-bit registers. (Under Linux, FAT12 is limited to 4084 clusters.[8]) The disk's size is stored as a 16-bit count of sectors, which limited the size to 32 MB[9]. FAT12 was used by several manufacturers with different physical formats, but a typical floppy diskette at the time was 5.25-inch, single-sided, 40 tracks, with 8 sectors per track, resulting in a capacity of 160 KB for both the system areas and files. The FAT12 limitations exceeded this capacity by one or more orders of magnitude. The limits were successively lifted in the following years which increased storage capacity dramatically but eventually rendered FAT12 obsolete.
Click to expand...
- Wikipedia
 
WTF is a floppy disk.......haha jk

Anyways how did it get like that???
 
Is it possible that this is a RAID artifact? IOW - it should look like that if you don't go through the RAID controller/software.

I have no idea, but that comes to mind.
 
It doesn't matter whether I look at it as part of the RAID array or as a single drive, it always shows up the same way.


I think it must have occured when XP tried to repair the installation when it wasn't viewing it as an array, but a single drive. I don't know why the conversion to FAT12 and only for 10 mg. My hope is that sisnce the FAT12 drive is only showing up as 10 mg, that the rest of my data is still intact if I can figure out how to 'unlock' it.
 
I forgot to post my solution earlier, so here it is in case someone else does this.

First, I formated the partition inwindows with Easeus Partition Manager. Its free and works pretty well.

After that I used PC Inspector File Recovery to scan the partition and recover what it could. I got most everything back.

Only irritation is that all the files are 1400k, and they have generic names. But they do have the original extension.

All in all, for having screwed up pretty royal, Im pleased with the outcome.
 
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