Dynamic Volume recovery

[Zaid]

I recently tried to connect a friends hard drive to my computer and somehow managed to corrupt my master file table on my second hard drive, a 200 gigabyte seagate. Windows now refuses to boot with the second hard drive connected, it tries to run CHKDSK and then tells me that it was aborted due to a corrupt master file table. The machine then hangs and i have to restart and disconnect the drive before i can boot into windows. There are a few important files that i need to get off the drive, preferably everything if possible. The file system was NTFS and it had a single dynamic volume. Since i cannot boot into windows with the drive connected, i am turning to linux to hopefully fix my hard drive. I have read numerous threads on this forum concerning recovering data from hard drives, yet i have seen no mention of dynamic volumes. I have also perused through the websites of some partition recovery software such as gpart and testdisk, yet i am worried about the fact that my drive had a dynamic volume on it, and not normal partitions. I am aware that dynamic volumes use the last megabyte of disk space to store volume information, and my question is will utilities such as gpart and testdisk be able to correctly identify the volume and be able to to write a correct "partition table", and if not, what other options do i have to recover my data? And will simply writing a new partition table compromise my data in any way?

[Harry Kuhman]

Any attempt to write to NTFS with Knoppix is folly. Can Knoppix see the files and read them?

[Zaid]

Nope, there is an icon on the desktop, but when i click it, knoppix gives an error about mounting the partition

[Harry Kuhman]

Without knowing what the error is, I would have to guess that the partition is too damaged for Knoppix to read it.

[Zaid]

Are there no data recovery utilities for linux that will bypass the partition table and scan the hard disk for files like there are for windows?

[Harry Kuhman]

gpart tries to recover the pertition table. But I have no expectation that it will work with dynamic volumes.

[rusty]

There is alsp lde (linux disk editor) http://lde.sourceforge.net/, but no support for ntfs, you can still apparently use it in binary mode.

Also came across this: http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page, which is new to me. Maybe it can help?

[nad]

Why would we be aware of an application that can repair the damage within a deviant storage method created by an uncooperative and unhelpful organization that refuses to openly document the structure?

One of the reasons that you are having such issues is that dynamic volumes do not use a partition table and I am under the distinct impression that there are _very_ few people at the borg who know enough about dynamic volumes to give advice. It is sort of like a b-tree file system without a container. I suggest that you seek assistance from your os vendor any way. Good luck.

And by the way, there are several utilities that will read the binary data on the disk, the problem is reconstructing that into something useful. Most system administrators I know have effective and rigid backup plans as well as _redundant_ storage. This type of issue just does not arise.

[Stamitz]

I suppose it's possible to use forensic software, like encase (www.encase.com) to restore the files on your crashed hard disc. I have done that several times. Take a look at www.download.com and search for forensic or crashed / also www.datadoctor.in may help ...