[LexTalionis]

I recently decided to restore my PC to its original glory after having some trouble with Spyware and also some Spansih Norton software I couldn't remove. I used the system restore disk that came with my computer (restoring it to Windows XP home edition, i was on Pro before). Once I got it running some of my disks are now unreadable. I have three hard drives and now only one and a half are readable. Drive C is fine and so is the first partition of E. When i try to access the second partition of E (labelled F), however, it says 'F: is not accessible the file or directory is corrupted and unreadable. When I try to access D it says thaty the drive is not formatted and would i like to which i certainly would not as there is a lot of important music projects on there and i am, regrettably, slightly behind with my backups.

Now i thought windows Restore should only restore drive C and leave the others as is. Is it something to do with the settings in windows. I ahven't yet downloaded SP2 cause the site keeps giving me errors. Would installing back to XP PRO make any difference.

Both the drives that I am having trouble with were divided into partitions under Partition Magic 8. I installed that to see if it would help recognise and read the drives but it hasn't.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Alex.

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Run a check disk on the two volumes that are not working

start > run
run
<enter>

chkdsk d: /r
<enter>

(and so on, substituting d: for bad volumes)


Are they basic or dynamic volumes

[gerryf]

Run a check disk on the two volumes that are not working

start > run
run
<enter>

chkdsk d: /r
<enter>

(and so on, substituting d: for bad volumes)


Are they basic or dynamic volumes

[LexTalionis]

Thaks for the fast response.

I am not sure how to check if they are basic or dynamic but i think they are dynamic volumes.

I ran check disk on both bad volumes and ...

for d: it said the file system was RAW.

for f it said it was unable to determine volume version and state.

[gerryf]

I doubt they are dynamic volumes---you would know if they are because you would have had to set them up that way

How many PHYSICAL drives are we talking about --actual harddrives you can hold in your hand?

[LexTalionis]

There's 3 drives:

120GB
200GB
300GB

Before the Restore they were divided into 6 seperate partitions (two on each).

I have just managed to install SP2 and now F seems to be as normal and without error. So two physical drives are now operating as they did before but the third (D) is still with problems.

D is now no longer recognised in MyComputer and is still showing up the same in Partition Magic (it says type 44 HEX).

[LexTalionis]

Also, i didn'ty set them up speciffically any special way so I guess they must be basic volumes.

[gerryf]

i found a post about some guy using partition magic to convert hex 44 to fat32...it was rather vague, but he said it worked.

Since I do not have partition magic, I cannot tell you how to do this, but you might want to look in the help file

[LexTalionis]

I think installing Norton GoBack was my main problem here. I found a site where a guy experienced somehting similar and followed his advice:

Type 44 partition is a made by symantec go back and cant be seen with partition magic... i was going to shoot my self cause i didnt had a backup but finaly i discovered a way to solve this.... go and download goback 3 from here:



http://www.majorgeek...wnload159.html


then you have to be able to install it.. maybe in another hd cause i dont know if there are rescue disks like partition magic has, so you have to get another hd an fisically installit in your computer then installs goback and it will ask you to restart... then pres space to enter the goback option menu an push the disable goback button after that you will be able to see your partitions with partition magic or else...
hope this is useful enough.. an sorry for my english.
symantec owns partition and go back why didnt they make them compatible......)?"/$!)?"/#?/!$........

As soon as I rebooted my computer with Roxio GoBack installed my hardrive partitions reappeared EXACTLY as they had been before. I then disabled GoBack and rebooted again and they're still there 100% intact.

Thanks for your time and help.

[LexTalionis]

It asppeared everything was alright after trying to fix it by reinstalling Roxio GoBack but i was wrong as my comp blue screened today after working perfectly for 12 hours.

After searching hard all over I found that Goback messes with a hard disk's MBR and that is why Partition Magic shows the drive up as HEX 44 file system.

I found out that I needed to remove Goback from the master boot record's of my infected drives. My problematic drive was my third hard drive so I connected that up as my primary then booted up using a boot disk i created.
Before that I created a floppy drive containing the Goback file gb_prog.exe from my goback folder.
When i booted and got to the command prompt A:\ I inserted the other disk containing gb_prog.exe and typed in "gb_prog /u".

This uninstalled what goback had put on in the first place and i knew i had hit jackpot cause the uninstall screen came up in spanish (the same as the original goback installation i was buggin about).

Hope it can help anyone else who may be suffering a similar problem. I'd leave this thread open a bit too incase i am wrong again and soemhting else happens and this solution isn't enough.. fingers crossed though.
Pz.