CDsDontBurn

anybody have any good suggestions, free would work best, for ghosting software?

i'm aware of norton ghost, but that didn't work out quite like how i had planned it. and i was also using partition magic, but that has just turned out into a big headache.

The Issue:

here at work there is a 250GB HDD we need to ghost over. however, the spare HDDs we have available are a 120GB and an 80GB. the 120GB drive ended up having a bad sector, and the 80GB is working just fine.

using partition magic, i first needed to resize the 250GB partition to match the 80GB drive we're using to copy the 250GB drive's info over to it. However, in doing so PM stopped and gave me an error code:

critical - code 19, "at end of something"

now, the original 250GB boot drive will not go into windows and give me a generic BSOD with stop code 0x00000024. googling the "code 19" brought me to this page with the following information at the very bottom:

which leads me to believe that this machine's data is now FUBARed, however, there seems to be a bit of hope from the above dialogue.

also, googling stop code 0x00000024 takes me to Microsoft's website which indicates that the disk has been corrupted. this site came up also, but skimming through it didn't reveal any real way of resolving the BSOD/partition issue.

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RoyBatty

chkdsk doesn't help? I recently solved similar Stop BSOD on a Windows 2000 machine by chdsking it in other PC.

edit: reading the last sentence in your post, probably not...

As a free PM alternative you can try GParted.

CDsDontBurn

ok, so i put the drive in an external drive enclosure and windows is able to detect the hard drive in its ful entirety. however, when i attempt to access the drive it gives me an error saying "drive is inaccessable."

checking the properties of the drive, it does not show me the entire drive size, but rather it tells me that the drive is 0 Bytes in capacity. however, if i hover the mouse over the drive, or click on it, that's where windows tells me that it's a 250GB drive (232GB usable of course). so, with this information, i know that the information on the disk is still there and everything, but now i need some method of being able to recover this information. the only way i'm aware of through linux, but i'm not linux saavy unfortunately

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Tipstaff

Whatever you do, do not run chkdsk on that drive. Running chkdsk as is from a Windows installation can seriously f'up the MBR/TOC. The only exception for chkdsk is if you run it off of a BartPE type disk such as Ultimate BootCD 4 Windows (I highly recommend building yourself one of these discs, btw). For some reason it works as it should from this state.

Although not free, I highly recommend programs like Active@ Undelete Pro (standard is fine, but Pro now has support for undeleting deleted or damaged partitions). There is also Recover MyFiles from GetData, however I prefer Active@.

If you're feeling adventurous you can always try out one of the free ones on THIS page.

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CDsDontBurn

i told my friend about my issues, and he gave me a copy of his Active@ Undelete program for me to use. showed me how it works and everything. so, i'll give that a shot.

as for running chkdsk, i did do that. all it did was nothing. as soon as i hit "start" it just closed out the window and nothing else happened. i don't know if that caused anything, but i'm sure it didn't.

one of the other guys attempted to perform a windows repair through command prompt, but it wouldn't give him any options for windows installation. like, he did a DIR search of C:\ and nothing showed up, he changed directories to the optical drive, and it didn't show anything in there either, so we thought that was pretty odd as well. so, after that, we just gave up on the machine and i made this post and talked to my friend and well...here we are!


thanks so much for your help so far guys! + rep for both of you

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charm_quark

i did have a problem with a drive like that once, i used "Recover MyFiles", when you do it normally nothing would turn up, but under the advance tab,and pick the "sector level search(slower)", under "search level" it did give results ,,, thought it will take you a long time(i mean super long) to recover, try it..

Tipstaff

Sounds like the master boot record or the table of contents is f'd up. I can't remember which, but I think it was MBRfix that is on the UBCD4W disc that allows you do rebuild the MBR (not the same as Microsofts fixmbr that you can run from the Recovery Console), and it does that by scanning the entire drive. It's the only free utility I can think of at the moment. There are others on the Hiren's BootCD you can look at too. Utilities like this one are very useful for those drives that show up as having 0 bytes or drives that Windows says is not partitioned. There's another utility (and probably a better choice) called PTDD Partition Table Doctor (I physically had to go look at the disc to remember the name of the program). With PTDDPTD (LOL!) I can rebuild paritions, restore deleted partitions, do MBR recoveries, and so fourth. Great thing about it is that it supports Dynamic disks, and other drive formats such as EXT. The bootable CD version is cheaper, and I'd use this one as it's independant of the OS.

I usually use PTD last after I've gotten about as much data as I can using Active@. Why? At this point I've gotten as much as I can off the drive, so I usually try to see if I can get it back up an running to the point that I can compare the data. If it works, great, and I'll recopy the data to a different folder. If it doesn't work, oh well. The other reason is file permissions. With both Active@ and Recover MyData I've run into circumstances where files they recovered were corrupt, or the files permissions couldn't be reset or were overwritten, and the user could no longer open them (if the user was part of a Domain only administrators could open them). Really weird, and something neither company could explain why it was happening.

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CDsDontBurn

i will give that PTDD program a try when i go into the office next.

Active@ Undelete worked out great! but, when it was copying files over to the recovery HDD, it seemed like it was taking forever. last i saw, it had an estimated time left of 10hrs. 30min or so. the folder i was recoverying is 23GB in size, so idk if that's normal or not. but, the original drive and the recovery drive are both in USB enclosures, so i don't know if that also has something to do with the slow transfer speed either.

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Tipstaff

Most likely the app is doing a sector by sector scan, or it's trying to recover data from a bad sector. If it is doing a sector by sector scan it can take a damn long time given that a 250GB hard drive has over 500 million sectors.

This is just a guess though as there can be all sorts of reasons for it, but this makes the most sense given how long I've seen drives take to recover simply becuase of a bad sector. The thing to remember too is that the data itself could be strewn all over the drives plater/s, so who knows.

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