recover failed drive?

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I have a Western Digital 160 G drive that I am/was using for backup as an NTFS dynamic disk. I have been swapping it in and out of my computer (open case, swap drive). I tried to put it in a spare machine which couldn’t see it because I had not added EnableBigLBa to the atapi parameters in the registry. After doing that and re-booting, it still wasn’t there.

I then used Disk Management and saw it as “foreign.” After importing it, it was reported as “failed” and could not be recovered. When I moved it back to the machine where it had formerly worked fine, it was “failed” there, too. When I put it into a USB enclosure and tried to connect that way, Disk Management reported it as “unreadable.”

Gibson’s “SpinRite” ground through it and found no errors.

This is not “failed redundancy” that MS refers to in the knowledge base. I suspect there’s a switch or an address set wrong somewhere and I would like to get this drive back for the data that’s on it.

(separate topic) I specifically want file I bought from V-Com but refused to pay them $7 for the privilege of downloading it at a later time because I always back up downloads. (SEVEN &^%$# DOLLARS!!! has made me a former customer eager to tell the world what I think of their business practices. Thanks for indulging me.)

Can I recover this failed drive?

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Download the diagnostics tools from WD’s web site.

Run them, then call WD tech support.

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Thanks for the suggestion, I did that, it passed, and then I got the following message: “Disk group has no valid configuration copies.”

Learn something new every day. I made this a dynamic disk for no particularly good reason and the problem seems to be in the configuration table (?) on the failed disk. The back-up machine cannot add it to its configuration and the machine where it once worked will not welcome it back.

I sure hope somebody can tell me how to recover failed configuration tables.

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Good, that means that the drive is likely physically good.
The disk is not failed.

Do you actually need the files on the drive?
If you do not need the files, I believe that there is a may to have a dynamic disk revert to a basic disk.

I found the following, dunno if it will help

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?…kb;en-us;294244%5B/url%5D

You could also ask in a microsoft newsgroup such as microsoft.public.windowsxp.general or microsoft.public.win2000.general.

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Thanks for the suggestion, I did that, it passed, and then I got the following message: “Disk group has no valid configuration copies.”

Learn something new every day. I made this a dynamic disk for no particularly good reason and the problem seems to be in the configuration table (?) on the failed disk. The back-up machine cannot add it to its configuration and the machine where it once worked will not welcome it back.

I sure hope somebody can tell me how to recover failed configuration tables.

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Download the diagnostics tools from WD’s web site.

Run them, then call WD tech support.

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If this was a dynamic disk just because, I would recommend Restorer 2000 Pro. It’ll read any NTFS drive, EXCEPT striped drives (so stripes and RAID 5 (which are striped mirrors) are not ‘viewable’ by Restorer 2000 Pro).

Thing is, you are going to pay somewhere around $50 (I think) for that recovery software, versus the $7 you didn’t spend.

Restorer 2000 Pro does have a demo version, so you can see if it finds the file or not. (I downloaded it years ago, when I goofed, and wiped out a partition of a co-workers machine, which had 6 gigs…yes gigs of actual real data (not OS or Program files). Whooops! The demo version found everything (I think it even lets you recover small files, don’t remember), but within a few minutes I had bought the thing on my own credit card, and have used it many many times to recover files. Money well spent!

There is another approach, free, but VERY VERY tricky. If you have the Windows 2000 Resource Kit, you can open DiskProbe, which will let you read/write to individual sectors on your disk. The reason your partitions are gone, is because you wrote over the boot sector, but dynamic disks keep that information at the end of the disk too. Do some searching on the KB and Google, and you’ll probably find some step by step (with a little guess work tossed in) procedure that MAY and I use that term VERY loosely allow you to ‘restore’ the volume back to life. Personally, I’d still go with Restorer 2000 Pro, because it’s a good investment when you use NTFS partitions.

Good Luck

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