help recover deleted volume :(

[Tjalfe]

So today I was going too fast in disk management and managed to delete the wrong volume. it is a seagate 1.5TB drive, with a NTFS partition from windows XP, drive was dynamic, if I remember right. I did do a full backup about 2 weeks ago, but loosing 2 weeks worth of stuff still sucks.

I did a quick googling and found this

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/245725

perfect, I think, it is the exact problem, so I recreate a volume of the same size ( the whole disk), without formatting it, then proceed to run dskprobe, as perscribed. This is where the process grinds to a halt. I select the right physical disk, enable writing, set it active, then read the sectors. If I select the volume end button, I get "Can't access backup bootsector from a logical device handle, please use a physical device handle". I did pick a physical device .
Also the total sectors shows as a negative number :"-753481239798607675" which indicates to me that the program can't properly access this large a drive. Any insight in how to make this work, or perhaps suggest an alternative way of recovering the volume?

[Evildead666]

Badcopy pro used to work for me in this case, setting the file extensions of the file types you want to recover.
A 1Gb compactFlash card tooka week to scan over a usb interface, I wouldn't like to fathom how long it would take for 1.5Tb......

Its basically a bitscanner that looks for the start and end of files....and then just takes whats in between...not sure if its very effective on a fragmented drive....can't see how it would know where the rest of the file is unless the "jump" indicators show where the rest of the file is....

Good luck anyway....

[Umfriend]

OT: No clue about FATxx or NTFS but in the AFS each block had pointers to the next and previous block.

[Tjalfe]

seeing how microsoft writes that there is a backup of the boot sector at the end of the drive, it would suck to have to scan the drive at the bit level.

[gt40]

would ZAR work.
If it looks like the trial works I can 'loan' you a copy.

[Tjalfe]

Thanks
I will take a look tonight... ZAR looks like it may work, but still doing way more work than it really has to, as it really should just need to copy the bootsector from the rear of the drive to the front

[Evildead666]

2hrs for 100Gb is bloody fast.
They probably didn't bench it on a quad with 4gb of ram, you may be quite faster....
8Mb cache also no?