Hey All,
The other night I was playing a little Max Payne 2 (good stuff BTW) when my USB mouse stopped responding. I exited the game and the XP desktop refused to come back up. I tried the standard things, ALT+TAB..CTL+ALT+DEL, but nothing worked so I was forced to hit the reset button. When the machine tried to reboot it came up with a simple command prompt instead of the XP Pro GUI. I did a DIR and saw the files on the drive but in 8.3 format. I did a hard reset and the system then refused to post. I checked all my drive connections and managed to get it back to the command prompt, but the drive was definately acting bad. I managed to copy some of my data off to the free space on an old spare drive I had but didn't have room to get it all. I then tried to reinstall XP off of my original install CD, but the installer said that the C: drive wasn't formatted or was formatted in an unknown format. I loaded up the recovery console and attempted to fix it with a FIXMBR, which didn't help, so I went back in and did a FIXBOOT. I also tried to run CHKDSK which told me that there were unrecoverable errors and stopped. After doing this I rebooted off of the drive and got the NTLDR missing message. I grabbed a spare old drive from work and brought it home and put XP on it. After that booted I tried to look at the drive that my data is on and it showed as blank. In properties it came back as a 10meg FAT formatted drive, when it is in fact a 60gig FAT32 drive! Drive Manager still sees that it's a 60gig drive, and FDISK says it's a 60gig FAT32 drive and a system partition.
I need some of the data that is now stuck on this drive, enough that I have started contacting recovery companies ($$$), but I figured I would check here since there looks to be some knowledgable folks. I've been doing this type of thing (building computers and such) for many years, but I really screwed this one up and I need guidance.
thanks,
Peter D.
Boston, MA
The other night I was playing a little Max Payne 2 (good stuff BTW) when my USB mouse stopped responding. I exited the game and the XP desktop refused to come back up. I tried the standard things, ALT+TAB..CTL+ALT+DEL, but nothing worked so I was forced to hit the reset button. When the machine tried to reboot it came up with a simple command prompt instead of the XP Pro GUI. I did a DIR and saw the files on the drive but in 8.3 format. I did a hard reset and the system then refused to post. I checked all my drive connections and managed to get it back to the command prompt, but the drive was definately acting bad. I managed to copy some of my data off to the free space on an old spare drive I had but didn't have room to get it all. I then tried to reinstall XP off of my original install CD, but the installer said that the C: drive wasn't formatted or was formatted in an unknown format. I loaded up the recovery console and attempted to fix it with a FIXMBR, which didn't help, so I went back in and did a FIXBOOT. I also tried to run CHKDSK which told me that there were unrecoverable errors and stopped. After doing this I rebooted off of the drive and got the NTLDR missing message. I grabbed a spare old drive from work and brought it home and put XP on it. After that booted I tried to look at the drive that my data is on and it showed as blank. In properties it came back as a 10meg FAT formatted drive, when it is in fact a 60gig FAT32 drive! Drive Manager still sees that it's a 60gig drive, and FDISK says it's a 60gig FAT32 drive and a system partition.
I need some of the data that is now stuck on this drive, enough that I have started contacting recovery companies ($$$), but I figured I would check here since there looks to be some knowledgable folks. I've been doing this type of thing (building computers and such) for many years, but I really screwed this one up and I need guidance.
thanks,
Peter D.
Boston, MA