Lost Partition

[johngreen]

So, my genius friends; I have an 80Gig Samsung drive (SP8042N) that is well loaded with .avi film clips (nothing your grandmother would be the slightest offended by!).
I am now aware that there can be issues when a slight corruption within .avi files can cause such isses as windows explorer (not IE) to seize and thereafter the machine to completely lock up.
This happened tonight and led to a point where, with the drive left in situ the machine in question (running xp, always updated, good anti virus)would not go past a DOS notification that 'NTLDR is missing - press control alt del to continue.'
With the drive reinstalled as a slave (this machine has four HDs in total) everything else works perfectly again but I seem to have lost or damaged the partition on the dubious drive and hence cannot access any data from it.
Within 'Computer Mangement' the drive is labelled as healthy and active although it also shows as being only 31.50GB
Trying to read from it in explorer gains the response that it is not formatted although of course it was formatted almost perfectly just a few hours ago.
Any bright ideas how I might regain the data - especially the 18 Gig film that I had just finished edititing and was preparing to transfer to DVD backups in case I had a disk failure or something similar....

Rats!!!

Thanks in advance...

jg

[Bushfiva]

If you need a quick, fairly point-and-shoot tool, you could install the free Easeus (a Partition Magic clone) and see if it spots a partition problem it would like to fix.

[ninibearkiss]

+1 EASEUS :D

Actually, to my experience, EASEUS Partition Master (http://www.partition-tool.com/)works better than Partition Magic. Partition Magic hasn't been upgraded for years and what can you expect from this out-of-date partition software?

[Bushfiva]

Oooh, nice find.

[johngreen]

Thanks for those suggestions.

Find and Mount, the name of which does rather sound like it may lead to something more exciting than just fixing a glitch, is certainly a useful bit of kit but unfortunately (for me), it's not up to the task at hand.

I had a recent premonition about disk failure which had encouraged me to make sure other backups were done...

I hate computers!

jg

[johngreen]

Apparent cause of problem is the mess that happens to disks when many and large .avi files are moved about and worked with - as in the editiing process.
Lesson learnt and passed on; if working with such material, defragment disks often!!
A commercial product from the suggested Easeus orgainsaton did recover some files and got the disk cleaned, reformatted and running again but many of the .avi files, although recovered are corrupted beyond use.
Another two days lost to playing with computers rather than getting the job done....

sigh....

[Bushfiva]

I don't suppose your .avi files are approaching 4GB and the hard drive is formatted as FAT32?

If your corrupted .avi files are mpeg2, you might want to see what something like VideoReDo would make of them.

[johngreen]

Thanks for the thoughts.
My disks are all NTFS but the file sizes go up to 18GB. These are the original edits from which I would then make either MPEGs or DVDs.
The importance of defragging was made clear to me by a colleague of much greater avi experience and for sure, looking at the pre-defragging analysis, it is quite clear that such files make a complete dogs dinner of the idea of contigious files.
Also perhaps interesting to note that Norton Speed Disk appears to make a far more serious job of sorting the data and that the end analysis looks far more 'sorted' than managed by the Windows defrag jobby...

We live and learn....

jg