How can I persuade Win2000 to give me access to a defective HD

Bought a Seagate 80GB HD just a month ago only to put data on it (no system, no programs) and now it is dead. Win2000 tries to CHKDSK the device during startup and hangs just before showing its final results. Skipping this CHKDSK also results in a hanging system. It seems to me as if data could be recovered from this disk if I could get somehow access to this device.

I'd be grateful for any suggestions!

E.G.Gru

 

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/ntrecover.shtml

 

Thank you Newt!

First I tried Remote Revover, for the machines are connected anyway in a small TCP/IP network, but failed to make contact. Remote Recover does not recognize the network adapter (which is working happily under normal circumstances) inspite of putting all the necessary drivers onto the boot diskette ... It returns some sort of I/O conflict. Well then I turned to NTRecover with the serial connection. Just returned from the shops with a new serial crossover cable, connected and - nothing! The client program turns to a black screen and reacts only to an Alt-Ctrl-Del and the host program returns a "NTRecover driver error - device not ready ".

I am now turning to Sysinternals for help. If you want me to I'll keep you posted.

Kind regards,

E.G.Gru

 

Please do keep up up to date on this. I'd love to hear why a couple of usually rock solid recovery programs bombed.

Sorry for the response delay but I fished all weekend. Tough life but somebody has to do it.

 

Little progress has been made so far. After the desaster with NTRecover I reverted back to RemoteRecover and tried to contact Sysinternals. Today I got the first message back (with rather common contents), but contact is established!

Of course, I did some investigations myself and now the situation is even more weird than before. The clients side (DOS) is now able to use all resources from host (Win2000 Prof), i.e. I can use all networked resources from Win2000 in DOS, but still can't see the DOS client nor use it from Win2000. This is very strange for both are in the same network (192.168.0.100 DOS and 192.168.0.1 Win2000) and in the same workgroup.

... and I am still not sure whether Win2000 (not recognizing DOS network for some weird reason) or DOS (hiding itself from the network for some weird reason) is to be blamed. Hence I posted a question in Microsofts Win2000 Networking newsgroup with no answer so far.

Kind regards,

E.G.Gru

 

Hello Newt,

Just to tie up all the loose ends - here is the end of the story ...

Rather quickly the contact to people from "Remote Recover" was established and while they were brooding over my connectivity problem I managed to solve this connevtivity issue between DOS and Win2000 myself. However, I was very disappointed to learn that this will not solve the problem in "Remote Recover ". Just have a look at a mail I wrote to them:

quote:

"I found MS-DOS Networking Server Extensions on the Internet and installed it on the DOS boot disk for the client. This really brought some success because Win2000 host recognized the DOS client from then on (well, only when DOS client starts after(!) Win2000 host, but still ...). Unfortunately Win2000 host still failed to talk to the client (some msg "Unable to access \\Dosclient - access not supported" or similar) until I found a hint on the net telling me one has to use the "net use command" on Win2000 if one wants to connect to shared resources on DOS. This I did and - could access data on DOS client from Win2000!

One should think this solved my problem. Nope! I am sorry, but Win2000 still does not talk to DOS client in general (still the same message as pointed out above), only the communication established via "net share" (DOS side) and "net use" (Win2000 side) works. This is not enough for your RemoteRecover (still fails with "unable to connect ") nor for me (I am not able to share the broken disk on the network because DOS does not see an NTFS drive) ... "

end of quote:

The support people then abandoned the idea of "Remote Recover" and suggested to use "ERD Commander" instead. Well, I paid and downloaded this piece of software just to learn that the part, which would have helped me, is missing from the downloadable version - the "Disk Commander ". As it turned out to be - "Disk Commander" (able to salvage data from a broken disk) is part of a larger software package sold for severely more money than I as a single person can afford. This was the point when I gave in, took the broken disk out of my machine and gave it to a professional recovery service. Just a minute ago I got a call - they are able to recover all data from the broken disks data partition (no need to recover the Windows swap partition also on this disk) for a fraction of the price I'd have paid for the software offered, but it is still a considerable amount of money though.

The essence of all of this - backup is now running on my machine daily and automatically to a separate disk dedicated to hold just backups ...

Take care!

Kind regards,
E.G.Gru

 

Thanks for the update. Glad it finally worked out but Yuck on the amount of hassle and $$ you had to expend.

And yup - the full version of that Wininternals toolkit (Administrator's Pak) is wonderful but way out of reach for most folks. $1000 or $1500 or something for a single user license I think.

 

You could bet your life I'd like to get hold of this "Administrator's Pak "!! People at Winternals seem to be most capable - judging by their "ERD Commander "! But the amount of money is just beyond every economic justification for this - hopefully - single event - it's closer to $1500,- than to $1000,- !

 

It is a sweet suite for sure but as you noted, pricy for a single user or even for a small network. For a business network of any size, I'd consider it the best way I can think of to spend some money. I certainly wouldn't want to work without it.