partition, mbr or ntld?

[fisherbee]

Hi All,

I hope this question has not been asked many times before. I am trying to rescue files off of a Seagate Barracuda 160 GB Sata HD. I have a working installation of windows xp SP2 on a seagate barracuda 120 GB IDE drive. The non-working SATA drive is connected to the biostar M7VIG Pro-D motherboard by way of a CompUSA (non-raid) SATA PCI CARD. lspci -v recognizes the card's satalink controller chip.

I've run "sfdisk -V" and came up with: sfdisk: ERROR: sector 0 does not have an msdos signature. /dev/sda: unrecognized partition table type
sfdisk: no partition table present.

I've run "gpart /dev/sda" and I got: ***Fatal error: cannot get sector size on dev(/dev/sda).

I've run "mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1" and I got:
Error reading bootsector : Input/output error
Failed to startup volume : Input/output error
Couldn't mount device '/dev/sda1' : Input/output error

I've run "fixdisk" and I was able to see the contents of the drive after running the "analyze" command.

I don't understand if all these clues indicate whether the partition table, mbr or ntld is damaged?

[Harry Kuhman]

I don't understand if all these clues indicate whether the partition table, mbr or ntld is damaged?

It sounds like a partition table issue. The partition table, of course, is the last part (64 bytes) of Sector 0, after the boot code that is the MBR.

However, I have no idea what a ntld is, and Google didn't help me figure out what you were talking about there.

I have no experience with SATA drives, so I'm at a bit of a loss to know what might be different from them than normal IDE drives. And many of the tools that I have that would help with IDE drives don't support SATA. You might try gpart in KNoppix and see if it thinks it can make sense out of the drive. Or you might want to dig out the CD that likely came with the hard drive and see if there isn't something there that will get the drive happy again.

[fisherbee]

Thanks for your reply Harry,

The Seagate Diagnostic Tools have not helped except showing how many bad sectors there were on the disk, and btw it showed about 10 bad sectors.

My SATA drive is controlled by a PCI card. I've wondered if starting Knoppix at the boot prompt with "knoppix nodma" would help at all in mounting the drive?

"It sounds like a partition table issue. The partition table, of course, is the last part (64 bytes) of Sector 0, after the boot code that is the MBR." I am steeling myself to rebuild the partition table, does anyone have any idea about the success rate of rebuilding the NTFS partition tables on SATA drives for use with Win XP?

"However, I have no idea what a ntld is, and Google didn't help me figure out what you were talking about there. " I think my mention of NTLD was off topic here.

I've run "gpart /dev/sda" and I got: ***Fatal error: cannot get sector size on dev(/dev/sda).

The icon for the drive shows up on the knoppix desktop as an icon(the icon looks like a USB Thumbdrive) but the drive cannot be mounted.

[TopFarmer]

I'm a novice on Knoppix so can not help with their hdd tools.
"ERROR: sector 0 does not have an msdos signature" indicates the last 2 bytes of sector 0 does not have the needed "AA55" code. If you run 'fixmbr' from the XP's recovery conlole it will fix that problem but it can (not usually) cause other problems that would then need fixed (miss identfies partition types).

How many and what type are the partitions on hdd ?

"/dev/sda: unrecognized partition table type" do not know if that is from the missing msdos signature bytes or not, but sespect it is a different problem. As "Harry Kuhman" posts I also have not knowlege of SATA hdd's but would look into "TESTDISK" , it will check the hdd for Volume Boot Records and rebuild the partition table , unknown if it works on Satas hdds. Be sure to read the How to use on site. http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

It has worked for me for FAT32,NTFS,Linux,Linux swap partitions on a 120g IDE hdd.

Can try a pay for program "Partition Doctor", have not used. There are many more.

If the bad sectors are in the MBR or any Volume Boot Record sectors (first sectors of all volumes) , unknown what will help you out.