Hi. A bit of a biggie for a first post but that is how I found the forum..looking for help and I hope this is the place :)
My system comprises of...a very powerful (!):

DaeWoo Celeron 400, 256Ram.
Windows 98 S.E
I have a strange problem with my HD. It is a MAxtor DiamondPlus8 40G. My PC took a slight 'knock' the other day as the tower is on the floor and I accidently bumped it. Nothing too hard but it hit it nonetheless and the screen went 'bluescreen' saying 'Cannot read from Drive E:' I pressed any key and it went back to normal and carried on apparently unharmed. I took the precaution of retrieving 'My docs' and 'Favorites' folder which I store on there, before rebooting into a now, wrecked(?!) PC.
The E: Drive is now, still appearing in Explorer as is also a 'new' Drive named G:
There never was a G: Drive and If I inspect the drives with some programs they tell me that G and E are what appears to be the same 40g drive! As there is only ONE 40g drive then I can only assume that somehow windows thinks there are two of them!!
When I try to access either E: or G: I get a windows alert with the following message:
'E:\ is not accessible. A device attached to the system is not functioning' 'RETRY or CANCEL'.
This is non negotiable! I cannot seem to get anything else from the E: or G: drive in explorer!
If I use FDISK in DOS it tells me that the E: Drive is indeed there and partitioned and apparently all is fine!
If I use partition magic it tells me that all is fine too. The only other problem is that If I try to use partition magics OR windows own, scandisk for errors I get the following:
'Scandisk cannot check this drive now because the disk is not properly formatted, ora program such as a disk utility has locked it. Format the disk or wait for the utility to finish, and then restart Scandisk.'
Hmm. I find there is no way around this one either. scandisk for DOS will not run on E:.
I then go into devicemanager and on the surface everything looks normal. no hazard symbols or failed warnings. the HDs and controllers all say this is functioning normally. Then I look at the System/properties/ Performance TAB and I see this:
'Drive E is using MS-DOS compatibility mode File System'
Click here for details.
when I click it just brings me a WinHelp dialogue explaining very limited info about this.

So, my problem practically speaking is this:
If I use various utilities I can SEE the files and folder structure on my FULL(!) 40g HD called E:\
Yet, I cannot get to these files. I can save them one by one with PCfile inspector program but it is very slow and also crashes a lot. Plus I saved some MP3s and they were corrupted with half of one song and bits of another in the one MP3!
If I have lost the music files then I can live with that but I have a lot of digitial photos and documents on there.
Is there any way I can somehow fix this?
Can I do anything with the MBR that could somehow get this drive to be accessible, not only through a utility?
Is it broken forever..?
Please please help!
Just out of interest, this mademe hopeful: When I run a prgram on the drive it 'found' the folders/files in less than a second almost as if it was just accessing it directly. why can't I translate that into a way for me to somehow reset it myself?
(I know I might be talking rubbish but I am desperate here!)
Thanks for any help in advance!

Forgetting G: for the moment - but how have you managed to install Win98 onto other than a C: drive letter? Is this the only HDD and OS on your PC and if not then what hardware configurations do you have. If you can, run PartitionInfo from the PartitionMagic Start Menu and post the results back here. Since it seems likely to be a software problem your data should be recoverable. If your data is important enough consider getting a second hard drive (or some way of writing to removable media) and clone the contents from one HDD to the other - at least until all the data has been recovered to your satisfaction.

Thanks for replying.
Hmm. I do have a C: drive of about 6g and a D: drive which holds a couple of Gigs and Acronis Secure Zone which is where I backup C: (Windows OS Drive)and F:(Program Files Drive) every few days.
So yes, I have seperate drives and the OS is on a seperate one to that which is messed up!
I have already started retrieving files with 'GetDataBack' program which has let me get my digital photos, somew documents and some MP3s. Unfortunately a lot of files (about 40%) are garbled or corrupted. mostly the multimedia type files have the effect as if they have all been joined up into one and then split at random places...so the result is that each file you play will have about 15 artists and tracks randomply going from one to another all the eay through! (I suspect that if I had defrag'd the HD this wouldn't have happened so much!)
I do have PartitionMagic and it tells me that the E: drive is partitioned fine but has no file system. Likewise other programs tell me the same thing!
Acronis diskrecovery just scans my HDs then tells me there are none which need fixing! GetDataBack, although it finds my directory tree and files, etc it also, after a 6hr scan and lots of noise...gives you the choice of which 'possible filesystem' it found. You have to pick which one seems like the right one.
the choices it gave me were strangely, just like the 'mirror image drive G: that doesn't actually exist!'
I had two to choose from and both had exactly the same high percentage rate for a recovery (67%) and both contained the same number of files and both were 40,000MB or thereabouts.
The program also claimed that this recovery session had found a total of just over 80G!
On a 40G HD, amazing.
So it seems that the HD has somehow written into itself that there are two records of its whole filesystem and it is being treated as two HDs.
I am confuised. At least I have gotten some data now.
thanks for trying anf any more ideas will be greatly appreciated!
cheers :)

Please post the PartitionInfo results so that a fuller understanding of the hard drive structures and system sectors can be obtained. It looks, for example, as if D and E are logical partitions and F a second primary partition on HD0 - but without fuller info one is rather stabbing in the dark.

I think the two GDB "file systems" result from there being two FAT tables in each FAT partition; tables which are normally mirrors of each other.

It sounds as if the MBR partition table on HD1 or the Partition Boot Sector for the E drive or (if it is a logical partition) for its extended partition's boot sector to have become corrupted. If that is the only problem then there is a good chance of editing things back. If the FATs on E are bad then GDB or something similar are the only real hope for any decent DIY recovery.

When I run a prgram on the drive it 'found' the folders/files in less than a secondThat is not necessarily good news. It implies that the directory structure can be read OK but that the file system and the FATs have become disjointed from one another thus making the data inaccessible via that route..

Thanks for the most intelligent reply on this I have seen yet. Someone who at last seems to know about Drives and not just Drive recovery programs!
(like me! hehe)

OK, I am not even sure what you mean or what you want me to post here. I have the program PartitionMagic and its companion tool Partition Info but the info it gives doesn't seem to pickup on the errors I have seen in other programs...
NOTE: the first error about the size, has ALWAYS been reported in PartitionInfo utility ever since I installed a 40Gb HD on win98SE and my Bios was too old to handle it so I had to use MAXBLAST3 to enable the drive to be accepted and usable. Therefore I would ignore that error! (I mean ERROR#109)

OK here is what P.Info says:

Errors and Information for Disk3.

Info: Begin C,H,S values were large drive placeholders.
Info: End C,H,S values were large drive placeholders.
Actual values are:
0 0 80 0 1 1 0C 4997 254 63 63 80292807
Error #109: Partition ends after end of disk.
ucEndCylinder (4997) must be less than 4997.
================================================== ==============

Sorry, I just realised I can get a lot more info for you so here it is ALL for the drive in question, Disk3..


---------------------------------------------------------------------
General System Information:
Total Physical Memory (bytes): 267,911,168
Used Physical Memory: (bytes): 241,623,040
Maximum Page File Size: (bytes): 267,386,880
Current Page File Size: (bytes): 140,775,424

Disk Geometry Information for Disk 3: 4997 Cylinders, 255 Heads, 63 Sectors/Track
System PartSect # Boot BCyl Head Sect FS ECyl Head Sect StartSect NumSects
================================================== ================================================== =======
DSK3_VOL1 0 0 80 0 1 1 0C 901 254 63 63 80,292,807
Info: Begin C,H,S values were large drive placeholders.
Info: End C,H,S values were large drive placeholders.
Actual values are:
0 0 80 0 1 1 0C 4997 254 63 63 80292807
Error #109: Partition ends after end of disk.
ucEndCylinder (4997) must be less than 4997.
================================================== ================================================== =======
Partition Information for Disk 3: 39,197.7 Megabytes
Volume PartType Status Size MB PartSect # StartSect TotalSects
================================================== ================================================== =======
G:DSK3_VOL1 FAT32X Pri,Boot 39,205.5 0 0 63 80,292,807


================================================== ================================================== =======

================================================== ================================================== =======
Boot Record for drive G: (Drive: 3, Starting sector: 63, Type: FAT32)
================================================== ================================================== =======
1. Jump: 52 52 61
2. OEM Name: ASWIN4.1
3. Bytes per Sector: 512
4. Sectors per Cluster: 64
5. Reserved Sectors: 32
6. Number of FAT's: 2
7. Reserved: 0x0000
8. Reserved: 0x0000
9. Media Descriptor: 0xF8
10. Sectors per FAT: 0
11. Sectors per Track: 63 (0x3F)
12. Number of Heads: 255 (0xFF)
13. Hidden Sectors: 63 (0x3F)
14. Big Total Sectors: 80292807 (0x4C92BC7)
15. Big Sectors per FAT: 9799
16. Extended Flags: 0x0000
17. FS Version: 0
18. First Cluster of Root: 2 (0x2)
19. FS Info Sector: 0
20. Backup Boot Sector: 6
21. Reserved: 000000000000000000000000
22. Drive ID: 0x80
23. Reserved for NT: 0x00
24. Extended Boot Sig: 0x29
25. Serial Number: 0x00000E86
26. Volume Name: DSK3_VOL1
27. File System Type: FAT32
28. Boot Signature: 0xAA55


---------------------

Note - remember I said there never was a Drive G:? I dont know why partitionInfo hasn't picked up a Drive E: too. It says instead that drive G: has 80Gb.
Is this all the info you were requesting to see?
If not, please let me know and I will cut my right arm off for you if it means I am closer to getting a nice result on this! Plus I love to learn about these things!
Thanks in advance.
I also have acronis Disk Editor too but don't worry, I wont be writing anything to the Drive without passing a degree first! Just thought I'd mention it incase it is helpful or needed to try to fix it once I have saved important files. I would then love to try and learn about what makes it corrupted and where the corruption is; how it is repaired.
OK I will stop getting too excited for now.
I watch this thread avidly :)

After looking on google i realise that as I have used MAXBLAST on this drive to enable my bios to see it as larger than 32Gb, it has put something called 'EZ Bios' on there. An overlay it calls it.
Hmm the plot thickens. Does this complicate matters??
Cheers..

Please post the full PartitionInfo (or just upload a saved txt file if you prefer) for all the drives. Perhaps there's some explanation of the E/G drive letter enigma. Win98 assigns drive letters dynamically and AFAIK PartitionInfo would only report the windows assignments and not make assignments of its own.

I don't see where PartitionInfo says the drive is 80Gb. It does report the partition size as 80,292,807 Sectors (using LBA). At 512bytes/sector this equates to 41,109,917,184 bytes aka 38.28GB. The "Actual" CHS values of 4997 254 63 equate exactly to this value. What is strange is the 901 value for the number of Cylinders. The convention whenever a partition greater than 8.4 GB (or 1023 cylinders) is being reported (such as with this drive) is to enter 1023 254 63 as the written C H S values in the partition table; the software then only uses the LBA values and PartitionInfo back-calculates these to arrive at the "Actual" C H S values.

There is another utility that ships with PM called PTedit32 (and PTedit for DOS found on the PM floppies) used to edit the Partition Tables. You have to go to the PQ installation directory under the Program Files Folder to find it. You could try editing the 901 value on Disk3 to 1023 and see if that does anything. It's easy to edit it back again from within windows since Disk3 is not the boot drive. Just ensure you don't make changes to Disk1 or at least have the PM emergency floppies to hand.

I don't think the MaxBlast overlay has anything to do with your problem - but with computers just about anything is possible.

So, the Partition Tables (excepting the 901 value) look normal and the parameters from the Boot Record also look normal and correct. That assumes that the FATs are intact and where they are supposed to be. The first one should start at sector 95 (63+32 reserved sectors) which is the 96th sector on the drive, since sector 0 is the 1st sector.

I would suggest you download WinHex 12.2 from http://www.x-ways.net/winhex/index-m.html since its the only Disk Editor of any real good IMHO. Its free to use for all read operations and has a nice file browser (for each drive letter) and which can help very much with recovery directy or indirectly. Tools | Open Disk should get you started with it.

If you had a spare 40+ gig drive I would suggest copying the partition over to it (a) since it is better in general to experiment with a copy than with the original and (b) a simpe copy of a partiton using PM might just rewrite everything correctly. One step at a time I guess.

Thanks again, this is just a quick reply as i have to go out and got a lot to do today. I did the edit to 1023 but no change so i have left it like that for now.
I just received my new drive so spent a while trying to coax the old award bios into accepting 80Gb. Finally it works.
I now have the messed drive removed but will replace it tonight and return here.
cheers for now.
:)

When I used Maxblast to partition my 80GB HDD it automatically installed Drive Overlay Software and then I made the mistake of putting a bootable floppy in the drive BEFORE the DO banner came on screen. I can't remember all the details now, but the G: partition became inaccessible. The partition showed in Windows, but that was all. I think I was forced to re-partition and restore backups to fix it.

I know you stated that the error #109 has been there since installing the MaxBlast overlay so, like you, I doubt if this is critical since it just references a few sectors at the end of the partition. Particularly so if the drive has been in use without problems and with this error there all the time. But, as already stated, nothing like this is written in stone.

It is however strange that the partition is larger (39,205.5 MB) than the whole drive itself (39,197.7 MB) and it begs the question of just how this arose in the first place. This difference of 7.8 MB (is approx 16000 sectors). Since you have successfully used PTedit you could also try editing the LBA size from 80292807 to say 80276679. I doubt if it will do anything dramatic but it might abolish the #109 error. It is most unlikely that this 7.8 MB area at end of the partition contains any relevant data but you could also check that with WinHex (or similar). It would also be interesting to know how many sectors such software enumerates on the HDD; that is to say, "what is the last sector on the drive that it can read"?

Well I have been researching the EZBIOS aspect and have to admit that it does look to be the likely culprit. There is a thread at http://www.computing.net/windows95/wwwboard/forum/164145.html that shows up a related problem (related because in this instance it is the boot drive and not a slaved drive).

I have often wondered why one couldn't just use fdisk /mbr to remove such overlay and then access the drive on a mobo that supported large drives and the answer appears to be that when the DDO is installed it also creates an 8MB partition in addition to writing code to the EMBR on Track-0. This would also appear to explain the 8MB differential between the disk and partition size in the PartitionInfo report. It could also explain why a second ghost drive letter is somehow appearing.

If this is all correct then the question is how to repair or remove and reinstall the EZBIOS DDO. It is apparently much safer to do this while the drive is installed on a mobo that supports large drives.

It's your drive and your data so you are calling the shots. If it were me and the data was vital, I would first make a literal (sector by sector) copy of the drive onto another HDD on a mobo supporting large drives. Then try and repair the cloned drive using the MaxBlast Software.

It has been hard to find any good information on how the DDO is really constituted so I would love to see what is actually kept on that 8MB partition. Perhaps I will just have to revive an old 486 and then install the Maxblast software onto a large drive in place of the 300MB drive that it came with.

I'm very interested to see how this all turns out.

P.S.
Came across http://bootmaster.filerecovery.biz/appnote5.html which has some notes on removing the overlay. Perhaps the associated recovery program would help out into the bargain.

See this http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=36802

"1. Connected the card.
2. Booted up.
3. Card detected & installed the drivers.
4. Booted to "Maxblast 3" and removed drive overlay.
5. Shut down, switched off, connected Maxtor HDD to controller card using supplied 80 conductor IDE cable.
6. Restarted PC. "Please supply system disk" [no OS found]
7. Booted from Win98 Startup floppy, formatted C: drive, restored backup of C: partition from CD-RW disks using "Simple Backup".
8. Booted into Windows. C: D: E: F: seen, but G: not seen.
9. Ran "Maxblast 3" & "Maxblast 4" to check out the drive.
Only 32,253MB seen by BIOS, 33,816MB seen by Maxblast 3 & 4.
Partitions C,D,E,F seen correctly at original correct size & FAT32.
Partition G seen at correct size, but not correctly named/identified and seen as FAT16 [it was partitioned as FAT32 like the others].
If I select that and begin to repartition Maxblast offers to partition it to 33,816MB [full drive capacity seen] as though the other partitions don't exist. Normally it would only offer the remaining space."

I think my mistake was in step 7. Booted from a startup floppy BEFORE the Drive Overlay banner came up. The partition sizes reported may help.

Ok folks, been a bit busy with trivial matters ..such as life :) ,
but now I see the input here I am itching to get that drive back onto the PC and try some of this.
Thanks for the replies, it's great.
I do tend to agree about the error#109 as It has always niggled me purely down to the complete lack of logic in the fact that the drive is supposedly larger than itself!
OK, just going to install the drive and will get back to you.
cheers :)

Sylvander, in re-reading your old thread, Malcore was right on the money when he indicated that your probem almost certainly arose because the DDO software was incompletely removed. Your problem with getting all the capacity recognised was sorted after the drive was wiped. The opportunity for diagnosing that there was a problem may have been missed and was between steps 3. and 4. when there was no confirmation that the five partitions on the drive could be accessed before attempting removal of the DDO.

I don't want to confuse the issue by discussing your problems and this one at the same time but I do concede that (for whatever reason) the DDO overlay has been corrupted in some way in this case. From what I have researched so far, EZBIOS partitions should be of type 85 and this should be reflected in the "type" values for all partitons referenced in the partition tables. In this case the "type" is reported as 0C (for FAT32X) which seems to indicate corruption since no direct attempt of removing the DDO had been made. Without a detailed knowledge of where and exactly what such overlay software comprises I now see no way of reliably reinstating things by editing disk structures - unless the maxblast software itself can do so.

I would recommend using recovery software rather than experimenting - though if some experimentation is to be done then do do it on a BIOS that can do the translations. Then scrub things and start over.

I think that DDO (and incidentally RAID-0) should be avoided if possible if data loss is an issue and that great care over backing-up on such systems is paramount. DDO is a cheap fix for getting quick access on older BIOSes but pure hardware solutions are preferable every time.

paulgeaf
I wonder if you could/should use the "Maintenance Options->Update Dynamic Drive Overlay" which will "Replace a Corrupted DDO" [so its help says]?

Do you have [perchance] an "AVG Rescue Boot Disk"?
This makes a backup of the "System Areas" on the HDD and will restore those.
If you don't have one now you should make one in the future.

Paul
I backed away from that problem and settled for DDO.
It's not the best solution, but it just keeps working for me.
Perhaps at some point I'll have another go should the opportunity present itself.

Hmm. Not too much to report as again I have had a busy day but I was all set to remove the DDO with maxblast and was actually in the maxblast menu where it asks for confirmation to remove the DDO and I said 'NO'! - I suddenly remembered that, as my bios is so old and there is NO update for it then if I remove the DDO I will not even get the drive to be recognised by my PCs bios so therefore the recovery procedures will come to an abrupt end right?
Also If I am correct, when you remove this ezbios overlay then want to put it back on there, I remember the software quick formatting the drive and partitioning it when it puts the overlay in place. I am worried that this means I wil lose access to the data altogether. I know I can do a partition clone to my new drive but I still worry about the possibility of making the old drive unreadable with my bios, therefore making the cloned partition pretty useless too until I have another bios/PC which I want to get but have not the cash to do so.
Not sure what to do at this point. :(

paulgeaf
I wonder if you could/should use the "Maintenance Options->Update Dynamic Drive Overlay" which will "Replace a Corrupted DDO" [so its help says]?

Do you have [perchance] an "AVG Rescue Boot Disk"?
This makes a backup of the "System Areas" on the HDD and will restore those.
If you don't have one now you should make one in the future.


Did the maintenance option and the drive is still the same. Worth a try though.
I will get the AVG rescue disk sorted v. soon
the irony is that I have acronis true image and I regularyl do an updated image copy of both of my other HD's, just not the large one as I didn't have enough space!

"I was all set to remove the DDO with maxblast"
Yikes, don't do that!

"I will not even get the drive to be recognised by my PCs bios"
I think it would be seen ok, but only so much of it as it can give addresses to.

"Worth a try though."
That's what I thought.

"I will get the AVG rescue disk sorted v. soon"
Not much point in backing up a corrupted system area methinks.

"just not the large one as I didn't have enough space!"
Ouch! This would be easily fixed if you had a clean backup.
Is the software installation on the other HDD's totally different?
If they were basically the same, but with different hardware catered for, then you could repartition, reformat, & restore one of those backups onto this PC and then "repair" the Windows installation to cater for this hardware.
Or...
If you have copies of your important data...
You could begin afresh.
Repartition, reformat, reinstall everything, then copy over your data.

The AVG rescue disks are certainly worth having (if you have AVG of course) but if you want a quick way of backing up the whole of track0 (necessary for grabbing all of the DDO) try just formatting a system disk (win9x) or format "create an ms-dos startup diskette" (winxp) and add mbrtool from http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/mbrtool.htm to it.

Boot to that floppy, run mbrtool and use option 5 for working with track0. When you choose backup you can give it up to an eight letter name to remember it by. It will be given the file extension .128 for Disk0, .129 for Disk1, etc and saved to the floppy from where you can verify or restore it. A small, effective, easy to use and potentially "lifesaving" download.

If you have a spare slot then a pci card would seem the easiest hardware solution for your bios translation.

Hmm... in an attempt to reply to both of you helpfuk souls here I will just let youk now, the setup on the large -messed up E:\ now G:+E: dirve was basically storage only. MP3s, digital Photographs and a few large files which much to my ashamedness, left it almost totally full - A factor I am quite convinced also played a part in this or at least the fact that i neglected to defrag it for quite a while whlst also moving, deleting and such with files, it has severely hindered recovery programs ability to recover as there aren't many contiguous files.
Hmm not good news eh :(
when i mentioned the AVG disk it was defintely referring to a backup for the future! I am now realising that the chances of fixing this one a seriously low.
I am not giving up..oh no! I will attempt to mount this drive in a friends PC which has a good bios and therefore i can remove the maxtor stuff and then try to see what i can do with the data, if it can be seen or not or at least try another recovery on it or three.
Can i just ask you - what did you mean by this:'a pci card would seem the easiest hardware solution for your bios translation' ? Is there a way of overcoming an old BIOS that is not able to be upated by using some PCI card or am i misunderstanding you here?
Thanks again both of you.
:)

As long as you have a spare PCI slot this would be the sort of thing but you might be able to get one for under $30 if you search around.

http://www2.shopping.com/xPF-Acard_Technology_CONTROLLER_ACARD_PCI_2_EIDE_AEC68 80

PCI + IDE + CONTROLLER on eBay
http://search.ebay.com/pci-ide-controller_W0QQsofocusZbsQQsbrftogZ1QQfromZR10QQsa catZ-1QQcatrefZC6QQsargnZ-1QQsaslcZ2QQsadisZ200QQfposZQ5AIPQ2FPostalQQftrtZ1 QQftrvZ1QQfsopZ1QQfsooZ1

Thanks mate. Nice of you to go look those up for me.
These look like a great idea too. brilliant :):)

Hello all. I have some news.
I wonder if anyone here has heard of this website:
Media Tools Professional website (http://www.prosofteng.com/products/mediatools_pro_info.php)
I got their wonderful program and decided it had to work or it was going to be a formatting job.
Well, in short, it worked! :):):):):)

Here is some of the files I saved along the way in the process so that it might make some sense to you and you may be able to work out what actually was wrong with it.
It doesn't make too much sense to me i might add.

Ok firstly it scanned for drives.
Then it found TWO drives where there was just the one.
I chose one at random as they were very sinilar with some sublte differences in the cylinder numbers and so i chose the one that seemed like a 'normal' amount. (oops i cant remember what it was).
Then it scanned the drive i chose for 'system components.
when it had finished it told me it had found:
Partition Table
FAT
Boot Sector
erm.. some other stuff. (my memory isn't too good)

Here is the info file I got from it first and saved for you :


The two drives it had found were as follows:

The DRIVE 1 Info was:
IDE HDD 000
Model Number : Maxtor 6E040L0
Serial Number : E1A8SZFE
Firmware Revision: NAR61590

Geometry:
Cylinders: 79656, Heads: 16, Sectors: 63, Sector Size: 512,
Total Sectors: 80293248 (Size: 40.14 GB)

Repair Geometry:
Cylinders: 4998, Heads: 255, Sectors: 63, Sector Size: 512,
Total Sectors: 80292870 (Size: 40.14 GB)

DMA Supported : Yes
LBA Supported : Yes
Supported PIO Mode : 4
Supported UDMA Mode : 5



The DRIVE 2 info was:


EBIOS HDD 80h
Model Number : Maxtor 6E040L0
Serial Number : E1A8SZFE
Firmware Revision: NAR61590

Geometry:
Cylinders: 4997, Heads: 255, Sectors: 63, Sector Size: 512,
Total Sectors: 80276805 (Size: 40.13 GB)

BIOS Drive Number : 80h



I actually chose DRIVE 1 for it to work with as it seemed a bit more 'normal' (!!)

These were the details it also found:

Partition Tables:
Partition Table (0;0;1;LBA=0)
-Boot-System---Start CHS----Start LBA----Finish CHS-----Sectors---Size--
0 Yes FAT32X ( 0; 1; 1) 63 ( 1023;254;63) 80292807 40.14 GB
1 No Unused ( 0; 0; 0) 0 ( 0; 0; 0) 0 0 Bytes
2 No Unused ( 0; 0; 0) 0 ( 0; 0; 0) 0 0 Bytes
3 No Unused ( 0; 0; 0) 0 ( 0; 0; 0) 0 0 Bytes
Sector Signature: aa55h


Boot Sector:

FAT32 Boot Sector (0;1;1;LBA=63)
Jump Code: 52h 52h 61h
OEM Name: 'ASWIN4.1'
Sector Size: 512
Sectors Per Cluster: 64
Reserved Sectors: 32
Number of FATs: 2
Root Entries Count: 0
Total Sectors (16): 0
Media Descriptor: f8h
Sectors Per FAT: 0
Sectors Per Track: 63
Number of Heads: 255
Hidden Sectors: 63
Total Sectors (32): 80292807
Sectors Per FAT (FAT32): 9799
Mirrored FATs (FAT32): 0
Active Mirror (FAT32): 1
FS Ver. (major) (FAT32): 0
FS Ver. (minor) (FAT32): 0
Root Cluster (FAT32): 2
Info Sector (FAT32): 0
Backup Sector (FAT32): 6
Drive Number (FAT32): 80h
Extended Signature (FAT32): 29h
Serial Number (FAT32): 3718
Volume Label (FAT32): 'DSK3_VOL1'
File System Type (FAT32): 'FAT32 '
Sector Signature: aa55h


And finally, it gave me a view of the 'FILESYSTEM' it claimed to have found..which was definitely correct:
Root Directory (19;8;38;LBA=19693)
ÄÄNameÄÄÄÄExtÄÄÄTypeÄÄÄÄÄDateÄÄÄÄÄÄÄTimeÄÄÄÄÄÄSize ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄClusterÄÄÄÄÄAttrÄ
DSK3_VOL 1 File 07:15:2003 12:13:00 0 0 ---V-A
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..........SNIP!


So it was looking pretty good from right there.
I then opted for its 'repair bootrecord' option and it saved 2 sectors to floppy as a backup and then wrote to the HD.
That was it.
Done.
Here is the final text it created for me. A summary of the repair:
I will attach that one as it is quite long and i am not sure if there is a post size limit here..?
anyway download the atached as it is interesting.!

So I rebooted and the drive is there, working, files are all fineas far as i can tell. testing them and it is all good so far.
One thing is a bit bugging:
Windows scandisk insists that ' ONE OR MORE OF YOUR DRIVES MAY HAVE DEVELOPED BAD SECTORS - PRESS ANY KEY TO RUN SCANDISK WITH SURFACE SCAN TO FIX ERRORS'.

So now I have an 80Gb drive and have the 40Gb drive on here too. I will make a clone of the 40Gb, put it on the 80, then i wil reboot and let scandisk do whatever it is it wants to do.
Incidentally, I just run partition magic 'check drive/partition for errors' on the drive and it came back: 'No Errors'.So scandisk...hmm?
Anyway it is great news and THANKS FOR ALL THE HELP!
This is the ONLY forum that came close to sorting this out!!!
:)

Good Work and Fascinating Stuff and its also worth noting how good hindsight is. I originally wrote "and the parameters from the Boot Record also look normal and correct" but I now see I missed that the jump instruction was wrong even though the actual parameters from the BPB (Bios Parameter Block) were correct.

The BPB parameters delineate the Geometry of the File System (the cluster size, the FATs, the Directory Structure and so on) and since this was all normal it is not all that surprising that recovery should now be total. My guess is that (because that geometry was intact) that WinHex would have been able to show you a normal Directory Tree and get total recovery - though it would not have directly or easily repaired the partition boot sector.

I would be very interested to see the backup files that the program made - perhaps you could email them to me. My guess is that they are the original PBS and its duplicate kept 6 sectors further along the partition. I'm specially interested because the repaired jump instruction (ebh 00h 90h - changed from 52h 52h 61h) isn't "normal" either since it shows a zero jump and which is presumably why the OEM name is now shown as '' (with the name having been replaced by machine code).

Although I have yet to understand where, what and how the DDO is physically recorded on a drive, it seems more and more likely that such corrupted overlay was at the heart of your problem. What DDO does is to manipulate the machine code by redirecting it elsewhere (and like a boot sector virus plays with the executable code in the interim by using its own jump instructions) before returning the code to its normal place.

I'm actually currently struggling with an old 350MB Quantum that should never have had overlay placed on it in the first place and which seems to have totally "killed" the drive in the process. I only mention it because it's a very special case of WYSI-not-WYG. The partition tables seen from DOS are radically different from those seen from within Windows. Nor have I been able to edit this area of the HDD directly from DOS, Windows or Linux or by "zeroing the drive" - so I guess there could be a physical rather than an encoding problem. But nor can I find a Maxtor/Quantum program that will deal with a HDD under 500MB in size. I only mention it at all since an exact understanding of how the DDO "interferes with" the BIOS interrups would enable one to get a much better grip on this area of BIOS translation. That is specific information I have yet been able to lay my hands on.

But great news and well done.

Erm. The joy was VERY short-lived.
I now have a bad hard drive (40Gb) AND..get this! the 80Gb one has problems too, caused by partition magic!!!
I will add more later but suffice to say letting scandisk do its stuff resulted in a wiped 40Gb drive that cannot be rescued in the same way! I am now running getdataback on it to try to recover stuff :(:(:(
Also i tried to make a partition on the 80g drive so that i could clone the 40g drive onto it to save it. The problem seems to be that using Pmagic to partition on a drive with DDO on it, is a BAD idea!
It actually rebooted and had recreated the EXACT SAME PROBLEM on my 80g drive!!! ie-two ghosted drives of the same size, both inaccessible. this time i fixed it right away with the same process described above.
Then i rebooted and found i only had the new partition showing in windows for the 80G drive. which meant 40g approx!!!
So i looked in Pmagic again and it claimed i stil had two partitions on the 80g drive. one called E and the other G. ?I opted for 'merge partitions' and it told me it had to put the contents of one partition into a directory on the partiton i wanted to keep. Seemed straightforward enough so i named the directory 'OLD G' and proceeded with the merge operation.
Had to reboot at the end oif it.
Upon reboot?
I now had my E drive of 80gb back!
however..I now find that the directory called OLD G on the drive is full of 'junk files' bad filenames and undeletable or accessible stuff...just junk to the tune of 25Gb!!
I check with Pmagic and it now claims I have one partition on the drive of 80Gb, so it is kind of leaving me to sort out its mess up!
I cannot think what to do about that but for nowI am trying to cope with retrieving the mess that windows bloody scandisk made of my 40Gb one.

Is this what you call bad luck?


My conclusion is simply this: When i repaired both drives/partitions, what i was actually achieving was a removal of the overlay. which is, i think, why windows scandisk thought there was a problem with the drives and insisted i let it 'fix' it.
You see, even though i now have access to the 80Gb drive in windows I am not actually running ontracks overlay system anymore at bootup. The Drive Overlay logo no longer appears when i bootup. Thus it has been removed right?
so how windows and my bios is even letting me see the full 80Gb is a mystery to me.
and you no doubt ;)
Help..?

I need therapy...

"The problem seems to be that using Pmagic to partition on a drive with DDO on it, is a BAD idea!"
Agreed!
I have DDO in use and found that both Partition Magic AND Drive Image had severe problems.
ErnieK gave me a link to the "Ghost" website where the manufacturer made a statement saying they did NOT support the use of DDO.
To try and get the use of these I tried to install an IDE Controller Card.
Removed the DDO, then connected the drive to the new IDE controller.
Found that the contents of one of my partitions had disappeared and it was now registering as FAT16 instead of FAT32 [plus other nasties].
Had to give up on trying to use the controller card. Luckily I had backups, so I got rid of the Controller card, went back to the old on-board controller, repartitioned, re-formatted, DDO restored, restored the backups, and everything now works ok [but no use of Drive Image & Partition Magic].
I'm told that it would have worked if I'd removed the DDO AFTER connecting to the Controller Card.

Alex,
Why did you need to give up with the controller card?

Mine came with drivers on a floppy and I am using it to control a 250 gig HDD for storage with a dual boot 98SE/XPpro with no problems in either os. The os'es are on an 80 gig on the primary ide as master and the 250 is divided into storage partitions for dvd and audio work.

What I thing you should have done is put the large drive on it like I did and left the 8gig on an ide channel. You could boot to the large drive if you want or use the smaller one all depending on how you set up the BIOS. That way, no DDO software would have been needed at all, just like the way I have it.

I stay away from additional software whenever possible and go the extra mile to achieve it if neccessary. I could have enabled large drive support in XP but the drive would not be usable when in 98, so I opted for the controller. It was a breeze to setup IMO. AAMOF, because it is now partitioned into 60 gig sections, I'm almost positive that I could take it foff the card and put it as slave on the primary drive, now that there is no 'one' drive larger than 137 gigs. I will try that momentarily and post an edit...

Edit: :cool: :cool: :cool:

Well there's one less device needed in my box! Now I can free up a pci slot (not that I need it right away, but power consumption will be lower).

I think I'll put a sign out front on my front lawn:
Large drive partitioning services for hire... :D

Now it's as if the controller is merely a tool, unless I wanted a RAID array but my board doesn't support it? Dang, something else I need to figure out 'just because'... :rolleyes:

I have been tinkering away with my 300MB drive with OnTrack's DDO on it and by experimenting with it and researching on the web my own state of knowledge about such overlay now goes something like this.

The DDO commandeers the whole of the first track of the HDD. The real mbr on this first track has just one partition table which points to LBA-10 where there is another sector that looks very similar to the real mbr - though I havent yet been able to ascertain if this is a backup or if it has some other function. A "virtual" mbr is created on LBA-64 (the first sector of the second track on the drive). The partition type of the only partition table on the real mbr is type 54 and its size is the size of the whole HDD. In this respect it is a bit like a "specialised extended partition" that contains one whole logical HDD!

When you boot into Windows with the overlay in place this virtual mbr (the first sector of the "logical hdd") now appears to be the actual mbr though it in fact is not actually at the start of the physical drive. A hex editor (from within windows) can access this logical HDD but cannot access the first 63 sectors (the overlay's sectors) which remain completely invisible to it. A dos based hex editor (such as Norton's DiskEdit) can access the whole physical drive and is how I have found out what structures can be found on the real Track-0.

The rub is that DiskEdit can read but not write to the drive with no overlay in place. Any attempts to write anything anywhere on the drive without loading the overlay come to nothing; (in this respect both DOS and Linux seem to do a write but the changes never take effect!). If the overlay code is added to a boot floppy diskette using the OnTrack software (which must be the only way one can write to the drive properly from DOS) then I have been getting an "internal stack overflow" message when trying to run any dos utilities that would want to write directly to the drive; this includes DiskEdit and PartitionMagic. So I still cant write to Track-0 from DOS.

The next big consideration when "cloning" from such a drive is that a number of linked values must all correspond. Thus the partition tables' references must match the equivalent values in the partition boot sector and the partition boot sector's hidden sectors value must reflect the new position of the partition in its new cloned position. And so on and so on...

Thus if you do a sector by sector clone of the logical HDD onto a real HDD a whole host of references will no longer tie up with one another or with the new physical drive they have been copied to - even though the FATs, the Directory Structure and the Data are effectively intact and OK; that's why recovery software should do a good job with recovering such data.

I don't know if any of this helps you recover your data but it may help in understanding what is going on and why DDO is "complicated". I suspect that one should not use DDO unless one is just creating a single boot on a large HDD on old BIOS. Even then the way to do it is to let the DDO set up the partition for you and then install your OS into it rather than using any other third party utilities. I would also guess that XCopy would be a safer way of copying from an overlaid drive to a non-overlaid drive.

Just why scandisk had problems is anyone's guess except that it does write and re-order stuff and has been known to complicate recovery before now.

One might wonder just how the overlay controls the disk access and my incomplete knowlege about this is that the real overlay mbr loads code into RAM before loading the OS. This includes reserving and controlling specialised memory areas and functions. And this results in a Catch22 since you cannot get access to remove the overlay or edit its code while the overlay is in place because its in there working straight away. As far as I can tell the only way to "mess" with or repair or remove such overlay is by using OnTrack's own software. If the corruption doesn't even allow this then one is up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

One final point about the recovery software you downloaded was to do with the "two" possible file systems it could repair. On your system it accessed the drive both directly through the ATA interface and also via the BIOS interupts. Since both gave the same translation both would have recovered in like manner. I, for example, have both ATA/IDE and SATA drives on my system. That recovery software can only access the SATA's from the BIOS and so I only get one option with them but get the same two options that were given to you on any IDE drives.

"Why did you need to give up with the controller card?"
Couldn't get it to work, phoned the shop, they said "bring in your box and our technician will test it".
He tested it, said "it doesn't work on your board, and does on mine so it's not faulty, we'll give you a refund".
So I took the refund at put my system back the way it worked.
Next time I attempt that my knowledge will be more completely [in]formed.

Just saw this:The Drive Overlay logo no longer appears when i bootup. Thus it has been removed right?

Not necessarily or not completely. I know this from my own situation, whereby I can see that the overlay's track exists by running DiskEdit from DOS. The blue logo used to appear and now it doesn't. My problem though is different from yours in that I cannot get the Disk Manager program to remove the DDO - that option remains greyed.

Well my friends, I tried a fww more things before finally realising that DDO is a pain in the ass but also a requirement until I get something better..IE. a new PC :)
Would you believe this for bad luck...
I went off to bed last night after setting up GetDataBack to save lots and lots of directories which ir had found and all were in great working order(!hooray at last!).
It had about 35gb worth to do so I went to bed and left it busy.
I got up the mext day to a crashed frozen windows screen, not unusual these days.
I rebooted as it was all i could do. Upon reboot...
The 80Gb HD was?
Not accessible!
In the same way as before!!
Arrgghh!!!
Consider how I felt at this point; i forgot to add that before going to bed I had been happily testing and retrieving files and proclaiming how, at last, I had been able to find a workable solution.
Even those files which I had tested and saved myself were now nowhere to be found!
I rebooted and prayed.
Wow. Is there really a god?
The HD was back!
:):):)
Now get this.. the botched half assed 'removal' of the DDO has rendered the drive very unstable!
ALL of those retrieved AND TESTED last night, files were no longer usable!
Whenever I clicked or tried to run a file I had tested as working last night, I got the message 'Windows cannot open/run/access this file. And variations on the message of it being used by another process, locked, corrupt. etc etc et bloody cetera..
then I made a discovery about that too. As I had spent a long time retrieving and testing those files I was not about to give up on them just because windows had a problem with it!
I know better than to trust windows by now right!
So I fired up PC Filerecovery, the freeware program which works wonders and, in this instance, it did.
more soon...busy ;)

So. The files I had retrieved and verified the night before were now useless but PC Inspector fileRecovery freeware program did the trick.
I had to run that on the 80Gb drive and save those files to another Drive! Then they were fine and working!
Yet, left where they were they were useless. so the removal of the DDO has caused strange problems on the 80gb drive which means I am now trying to - as quickly as possible - recover as much data as possible, juggling it between the drives I have, then get the 40Gb DDO back on there so I can then copy what I saved to the 80Gb, BACK onto the 40Gb when it is working ok.
then finish by formatting and replacing the DDO onto the 80gb drive.
I hope that sounds simple enough as It isn't half confusing me!!

I DO NOT recommend using MAXBLAST.

Sounds simple, and I suppose it IS simple in practice [or is it practise?], if time consuming. :)

"I DO NOT recommend using MAXBLAST."
Seems an unfair comment to me. :(
Didn't it do exactly what it's supposed to do?
I've used "Maxblast 3" and "Maxblast 4" and they are a breeze to use and do their job very efficiently.
If they didn't install DDO software I wouldn't gain full access to my HDD.
It's my BIOS that's at fault by being unable to address the full capacity of the HDD.
They're offering one possible SOLUTION to a problem not of their making.
I've been using DDO for years, and the single problem I've experienced was caused by my incorrect use of it.

I suppose you would say that this is like a minefield just waiting for you to stumble upon the problem and step into trouble.
Isn't it all?
Some eminent thinkers say that life has to be dangerous or the evolutionary process would be subverted.
Carl Gustav Jung said that railway tracks shouldn't be fenced off to prevent people being killed by trains. If they don't have the wit to hear a train coming and avoid it then so be it.
Does that make him a Fascist I wonder?
Interesting to contemplate. :D

Hehe. yes I would have to say I agree with you there. My comment about maxblast was made whilst trying to undo the mess it has helped ME to create(!)
I have also used DDO for years and had no problems too. I suppose I could have said 'I do not recommend using Maxblast AND Partition Magic!' they definitely do not work together!
Your Jung quote is a fascinating one. I would tend to have a similar view. I don't think I am a fascist though.
hehe.