disk image backup/recovery

[plnyyanks]

Oh, gotcha. Makes sense now. I'm not sure what to do, though. Best of luck to you.

[Solidstate89]

You can try booting into a Linux LiveCD and seeing if you can copy the files from there. If you can, copy them over to either the C: Drive or to an external. You can then use G-Parted (under the same Linux LiveCD) to dynamically repartition your main drive.

I don't know how much experience you have with Linux (I would imagine more than me) but I've had good experience with loading up Mint onto a USB drive using Unetbootin and going from there.

[Ether]

Originally Posted by Solidstate89

You can try booting into a Linux LiveCD and seeing if you can copy the files from there.

The E: partition is the 2^nd partition on Disk1.

Linux does not display sda2 (2^nd partition on Disk1)
because it too doesn't see the file system on that partition (see screenshots).

I ran the following apps, with the following results:

MBR Wizard
- file system NTFS
- shows correct allocated sectors

cfdisk
- file system NTFS
- shows correct partition size

GParted
- file system unknown
- shows correct allocated sectors

winHex
- file system unknown
- shows correct sector count
- shows that there is data in the partition (log entry that I made the day of the "crash")
- shows that sector 0 of E: partition has been zero'd out

nfi
- "volume does not contain a file system"

EaseUS Partition Master
- says "unformatted"
- shows correct allocated sectors

Disk Investigator
- clueless

Bottom line: MBR Wizard and cfdisk both say there's a file system in the E: partition, but that's probably just because it says so in the partition table. The other apps appear to be actually looking for the file system in the partition, and not finding it, because Macrium apparently destroyed it for some inscrutable reason.

See screenshots here:

http://ether.comeze.com/FRC/77133/

[Solidstate89]

Well now...that is interesting.

I can't say I have any more ideas up my sleeve that you haven't already done 10 times over. That's an interesting problem, that's for sure.

Sorry I couldn't have been of more help, sir. Best of luck to you though.

[DonRotolo]

I am wildly speculating here, so smack me back if you know better.

It looks like the first several bytes of E:\ were erased. If you only could reconstruct that h200 bytes of data, the drive should resurrect, right? Well, *might* come back, anyway.

Any chance to find another drive, format it about the same way, and copy those bytes over to E:\? Or research what it *should* have in there and recreate it?

Someone, somewhere, can recover data that's been written over once. Investigate that for data recovery. Maybe that's too CIA for us mere mortals though.

Or call it a day, recreate what you can, and let it fade as a bad memory. No pun intended.

[Ether]

Originally Posted by DonRotolo

I am wildly speculating here, so smack me back if you know better.

It looks like the first several bytes of E:\ were erased.

The entire first sector (512 bytes) of the E: partition has been zeroed out.

I don't know enough about NTFS to determine if that's the extent of the damage (if so it might even be possible to reconstruct it).

It still puzzles me why Macrium would go out of its way to make the file system inaccessible, but leave the data and partition intact.

For the time being, I'm just leaving the E: partition as-is and using the 2 other internal SATA drives in the machine for workspace and backup.