XP and SATA drives
 

Advice again, please, gurus.
Athlon 3000 64 in a 'bitsa' with 1Gb RAM, 2 (different size) IDE HDs, plus 1 Maxtor SATA HD. Win XP did what it does best and crashed. I have Fdisk-ed and formatted the IDE's, re-installed XP Prof, and various software progs and all is well, apart from the SATA drive. XP sees that there is a drive there and, in Disk Management, lists it as "Dynamic, unreadable". This drive contains (I hope) several folders of recent photos which I would like to recover. I can make the drive useable by formatting it but that will destroy my piccies. Any advice as to how to get at the contents as is? I have tried PM8 and it, similarly, sees it as unreadable.
TIA

Could you try removing the two IDE drives and then installing XP onto the SATA drive - you don't have to reformat to do this. Aren't SATA disks supposed to be faster? You could then use the IDE drives as your backup medium. Buying a cheap USB caddy would let you hotplug one of your IDE drives in to copy the photos across, or you could burn them onto CD/DVD...

Just a thought...

Thanks, Richard.
I might give that a whirl but I'm not sure what the dreaded XP does to a HD when it's chugging away during the installation process. Presumably, it installs into available FREE space rather than overwriting specific areas of the HD. Just thinking about the clusters which are listed as unmoveable during defrag. Will approach with caution.:hmm:

CJ,

I am not familiar with SATA drives, not yet having had the pleasure of playing with them, but I would be extremely cautious of installing ANYTHING onto a disk that you know contains data, but where an OS sees it as unreadable.

If the FAT is corrupt, for example, there is nothing to tell the OS where existing data is located, and it will almost certainly be totally or partially overwritten.

I would only install an OS where I had already made a block-by-block copy (clone) of the source disk, and even then I would do the install on the clone, not the original.

Depending on how valuable your data is, you might consider going to a specialist data recovery outfit (google is your best bet). Although your assessment of the value of the data may change when you see the cost of recovery...

Good luck

SD

Has the SATA driver really been installed for XP? So nothing extraordinary is showing up in the Control Panel - Device Management? What you're seeing could be a "legacy" setup of the drive that will be different from the full SATA capacity.

Thank you SD and DBTL.
SD - Re the cloning idea, I'm not clear how I would be able to clone the drive if it remains unreadable ........ would this be a case for Linux??
DBTL - I don't quite follow what you are suggesting - the drive is registering in Disk Management as Drive 0 and is listed as "Dynamic, Unreadable" there is no capacity indicated but the Properties dialogue box recognises the drive as "Maxtor 6L200MO". I've tried loading the MaxBlast software to sort it out but it isn't compatible.
One avenue I'm considering is to buy another SATA drive and install XP on that and just run the two SATA drives with the IDEs disconnected - sort of combination of Richard's and SD's suggestions. I don't know enough about the peculiarities of these drives to judge if this would be feasible. It wouldn't be the end of the world if I lost the files on the present SATA but it would be nice to recover them.
Resolution - in future, burn copies of ALL piccies to CD , soonest!!!:ugh:

One approach which has recently allowed me to recover files from a WinXP system that wouldn't even boot is KNOPPIX.
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html
This is a Linux distribution that executes directly from the CD and doesn't require a hard disk at all. Don't let "Linux" frighten you, It has a very Windows-like human interface. While you could download and burn a Knoppix CD, it is also possible to purchase one at very low cost.

The current version 4 of Knoppix will read NTFS files without extra software. These instructions for an earlier version don't recognize that fact:
http://www.shockfamily.net/cedric/knoppix/

All that being said, there is no guarantee that Knoppix will be able to get the data off your SATA drive. Surely it will be impossible if the file system is corrupt.

If Knoppix is able to recover the data from your SATA drive, you can then try things with XP with far fewer worries.

YMMV

seacue

A little later .....
I think I have the answer, courtesy of BJKeates in his advice to Richard Spandit re corrupted SATA drive info. - Knoppix, or in general, Linux (to the rescue again!)
I booted with a cd of Knoppix 3.6. This 'sees' ALL my drives including the SATA and shows it as having 17+ gigs on it. KDE offers one of the Linux CD/DVD burning progs and, presumably, it's just a matter of burning the required files onto a CD-R and transferring them to one of the other drives.
I'm nothing like up to speed with Linux so would appreciate any tips on 'how-to's or pitfalls.
My less charitable side sees it as quite ironic that Linux is the remedial method for the post-crash debris of Redmond's finest!!:rolleyes:

CJ,

Glad it's working out for you - you can make a block-level copy of a hard disk with the software provided by the disk imaging application provider - e.g. Ghost or similar. You boot off a CD or floppy (I assume that you can get the SATA disk visible with the appropriate BIOS settings plus drivers), not the OS on the hard disk, so the fact that winXP can't see the disk shouldn't matter.

SD

Difficult question to answer without writing a huge amount. I'd say the major drawback of Linux is if you want to install software on your system that isn't on the system CD/DVD, it can be a pain. I wanted to install avidemux (Google it...) which under Windows takes a moment to install. Under SuSE 10.0, a pretty modern distribution, it took over an hour, because of all the different libraries I had to install. Apt-get goes someway towards addressing it, but still not as easy as MS, I reckon.

The thing I like most about Linux is the shell - I spend most of my time there - you can easily write simple scripts to automate processes that would otherwise take ages. BASH is to DOS what Ferrari is to Reliant... only better :)

Thanks again Richard and SD.
Would appreciate your further help with the following ...
Knoppix can access the problem drive and open all the files etc. I can bring up two windows, the problem and the secondary IDE. However, when I try to copy the drive contents I get a message to say I don't have permission. The help file says that one must log in as Root or Superuser to allow this. Trouble is I don't know and can't find the password for either. Any clues, please?
By the way, my other idea of copying to CD/DVD is a bit impracticable because of the file totals involved.

CJ,

If you have downloaded and "installed" Knoppix (I know it runs off CD), and not set any password for SU or root, then it must be default - blank?

SD

Some systems bring the SATA online for the traditional BIOS calls as well. This access mode may appear different from the "true" XP access mode, and the drivers of XP itself have been changed for a 48-bit compatibility since SP1. Therefore you might be able so see the same drive in different ways if you're not using the chipset/RAID specific driver.

Edit: for bootable system XP volumes the SATA driver usually has to be installed through pressing F6 at the tender moment during "the blue setup" and then -> (Specify additional Storage Device) and have your new SATA driver files at hand (where exactly, can be a bit problematic as the default is the floppy drive a: )