I have a HD with a single NTFS partion which have lost the
partition table info because of corrupt sectors/blocks.

I have tried DIY DataRecovery iRecover and OnTrack EasyRecovery
to copy/recover the data to a new disk. With DIY DataRecovery
I can scan the disk to find the NTFS partion and start the
recovery but the progress bar stays on 0% all the time.
The program also says Filesystem type is: Not known so far
during that time, even it it earlier found the partion info
when scanning.

When using OnTrack EasyRecovery the program starts and displaying
the filenames/directory it finds and increases the block
count but after a couple of minutes it stops at the same block number
every time I run it (#3840) and the disk sound stops which was
was heard up till this block number. And it does not continue to
even if I wait a very long time.

Is there any possibly to copy the information over to a new
hard drive in any way, which ignore corrupt block, so I can
revover most of the files?

/Kenneth

Run your disk's diagnostics first, to see how damaged the disk is.

"Ken1" <ken1@tjohoo.se> wrote in message
news:3bb6578e.0402211506.72d8ad1d@posting.google.c om...

In article <c18psd02she@enews1.newsguy.com>,
Eric Gisin <ericgisin@graffiti.net> wrote:

Download and burn a Knoppix CD (www.linuxiso.org). Boot it.
It tries to mount all your NTFS/FAT32 partitions, by default.

If it does mount your disk you stand a chance of copying the files to
another disk if you put one in the system. Probably best if you
pre-format the disk (fat32. Linux can't write to NTFS, yet.) (you
have to screw around a little to mount the new disk as writable. Ask
in one of the Linux groups.)

I've used Knoppix to recover data from crashed systems several times.





--
Al Dykes
-----------
adykes@panix.com

"Ken1" <ken1@tjohoo.se> wrote in message
news:3bb6578e.0402211506.72d8ad1d@posting.google.c om...
If it's already known there are bad blocks I'd clone the drive first to a
'known to be good' drive. If damage is indeed limited to the partition
tables (which I doubt), those can be rebuild on the new drive. Even if
partition tables can't be rebuild iRecover or EasyRecovery will probably
perform better.

Our DiskPatch program can used to clone disks that have bad sectors. I am
sure there are other as well, just make sure that they offer a mechanism to
deal with unreadable sectors.

Kind regards,
Joep

--
D I Y D a t a R e c o v e r y . N L - Data & Disaster Recovery Tools

http://www.diydatarecovery.nl
http://www.diydatarecovery.com

Please include previous correspondence!

DiskPatch - MBR, Partition, boot sector repair and recovery.
iRecover - FAT, FAT32 and NTFS data recovery.
MBRtool - Freeware MBR backup and restore.
CHK-Mate - automated CHK file analysis & recovery

On Sat, 21 Feb 2004 23:06:03 UTC, ken1@tjohoo.se (Ken1) wrote:

Is the 'corrupt sector' in the partitiontable itself, or in the NTFS
partition ?

Perhaps it stops at (or keeps retrying) the bad sector ...

Does the disk use Ontrack disk-manager to use the full capacity ?
(meaning a special MBR is used, making recovery more difficult)

Probably an area with bad-sectors ...

You can find bad-sectors using DFSee as well (see below), but if
the bad-sectors are the result of physical damage to the disk
(head crash) you should avoid reading and writing as much
as possibble since that might create MORE bad sectors.

Just try to read them just ONCE, to copy them to
a new undamaged disk ...

Yes, you can with my DFSee utility.

If you have a new disk available (of same or larger size) you can
instruct it to CLONE the old disk to the new one, and ignore any
bad-sectors while copying.

For a description of that procedure, read about it in item 51 of
DFSHOWTO.TXT that comes with the download, or read it here:

http://www.dfsee.com/dfsee/dfshowto.txt

(you have to scroll down to item 51 :-)

Note the description of the "-b:1" parameter, which will make the
CLONE
quite slow (many hours) but will result in the minimum number of
sectors
being skipped as bad-sectors.

Once you have a copy on a working disk, you can use the DFSUNFD
procedure to find tha partition layout, and then use some CREATE
commands to recreate that on the new disk.

If the NTFS partition itself is not damaged, this should bring back
all your data.


The DFSee download includes a DOS, Windows and OS2 version,
and the DOS version is probably the best one to use here, started
from a bootable DOS diskette. You can even download a self-extracting
image of such a bootable diskette including DFSDOS.EXE from:

http://www.dfsee.com/dfsee/dfsee6xx_dsk.zip

After unzipping, running the enclosed EXE will create a diskette in A:


All DFSee programs will function without registration, but will
remind you of the need to register at startup.

Real use and support do require a registration though, see:

http://www.dfse.com/dfsee.htm#register

Regards, JvW

--
Jan van Wijk; Author of DFSee: http://www.dfsee.com