From Newsgroup: comp.os.ms-windows.misc

Hi!

F*cking shit! Every good PC user, admin, programmer, you have to help
me!

Situation:
I have a PC with an 80 GB hdd in it. 60 GB of that is a Windows ME
FAT32 partition, 20 GB are SuSE Linux 7.3 with a 2.4.10-4 kernel and
ext2 fs. A friend of mine has an 80 GB hdd with a pre-installed Windows
XP and NTFS v5 (actually means 3.1) and isn't able to boot that any
more. For he won't loose all his data by reinstalling Windows, we had
the plan to take his hard disk, put it in my computer, copy the stuff
to my PC, either using Windows or Linux, and then burning everythign to
CD-R.

What really happened:
First of all, we tried it the uncomplicated way. The problem was the
machine rebooting after having printed all of the BIOS messages. So we
pressed F8 to get into the WinXP boot menu. But whatever choice we
made, secure mode or not, there was always just a reboot. So we tried
the recovery disc, attempting to get into the recovery console. That
worked, but actually we weren't able to enter the correct admin
password, caused by a known Windows bug. So we downloaded the correct bootdisks (six!!!) from the Microsoft website which were said to solve
the problem and really: finally were on the recovery console! I think
his Windows installation was a bit damaged, there were about ten
executables in c:\windows... so it is obvious that nothing worked any
more. We tried to get a network connection with "NET USE \\tobi
\transfer F:" but that didn't work, probably becuase the network wasn't
set up. But even if it had worked, we (as admin!) weren't allowed to
access the "documents and preferences" directory where all the
important files are, so we had to use the hard way. Took his hard disc
and connected it to my PC. Because in the SuSE support database they
said it won't be possible to access this NTFS version with Linux, so I
tried Windows first, where it worked only with a little tool (http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/ntfswin98.shtml) that made
NTFS partitions available to FAT32 windowses. (?) And so it did! ...for
about ten seconds. Then blue screen, reboot and the same shit again. It
just didn't work to access the drive long enough to begin copying the
files, even in the ms-dos console-box. So I decided to try Linux (I
start it from LiLo which is installed in the MBR) and I was really able
to mount the drive successfully and see all the files! So I began to
copy all the files from the NTFS partition to my FAT32 Windows
partition. That worked very well for a while and I was already very
happy with the fact that I could do something really useful with my
Linux, but unfortunately, after a while, my keyboard lights begin to
flicker in a strange way and I get a kernel panic message. Nothing
works any more and I reboot; this time to Windows again. There was no
blue screen any more and so I copied all files again in Windows. Very unfortunately that leaded to all of my files being deleted!!! DAMN!!
Now we had *two* PCs that weren't working... but the story goes on! I
didn't understand the problem immediately and rebootet but when I
select Windows from LiLo, I get "Non-System Disk. Please replace disk
and strike a key." - that is bad... I started from my recovery floppy
disk and in the DOS mode, I got to know that all my stuff was gone,
except for the programs that were just running at that moment when I
copied the files and the files themselves, but completely damaged. So I
ran "scandisk C:" from the floppy where I was told that the partition
has to be somewhat with LBA to be scandisked. So I used testdisk-3.11
(means the last 3.x-release) and changed the partition from FAT32 to
FAT32 LBA. Then scandisk worked, but fixed only the files copied from
my friend and found nothing else. So I tried to fix the boot sector,
but of course this wasn't the error. So, the last possibility: Linux.
Booted with the normal boot messages but then gives me a kernel panic:
(and the funnily flickering keyboard lights) the system isn't able to
mount the root ext2 partition (or something like this; I'd love to
describe more precisely, but this is only a secondary problem)

The problem:
HOW CAN I GET ALL MY WINDOWS STUFF BACK??? I invested thousands of
hours to write programs and websites, create wallpapers and Winamp
skins... DAMN!!! The Linux thing isn't the main problem because I had
copied of most files on my windows partition and actually this was more
a game and trying to administrate such a system than real work, but all
the windows data is really important to me; haw can I get it back? Is
it still somewhere on the hard disk? Then I could maybe go to such a getting-data-back company or something. And then there's maybe a little
tool I could use for safing the files myself..? And what's the reason
for all that, actually? How can I avoid these things in future?

Thanks a lot!

Bye
Tobias
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From Newsgroup: comp.os.ms-windows.misc

Bottom Line
You are stuffed!
If you had important things on the windows partition you should have
been taking regular backups, to at least, a CD
I had an NTFS partition failure a few months back with RH linux on
the other half of the disk and managed to copy everything off. You
should not have put this potentially damaging disk in another
machine.... for F*** sake.... As far as I am concerned NTFS is bad
news. I had an XP STOP error which the Partion Magic (v8) recovery
diskettes managed to tell me was due to an 'unmounted disk'. I had been accessing the NTFS partion from Linux (there is a 3rd party utility
which allows copying from NTFS to ext2, BUT NOT THE OTHER WAY, under Red
Hat Linux). I assumed that the XP STOP error (0x00000050) was caused by
a screw up with this utility at some point. HAving copied everything off
the Windows partition - not a problem really. I did try and copy
Documents and Settings and the Registry in the hope that I could copy
these back when Windows worked again in the hope of just transparently
going back to where I was.... Hmmmmm. I eventually had to bite the
bullet and using the PM8 recovery disks - reformat the drive and
re-install XP, AS FAT32- not NTFS. There did not appear to be any way to
use a boot diskette or anything else to get at the XP system. The XP
console is almost useless for this sort of problem... If it hadnt been
for the reliable installation of RH8 on the 2nd part of the disk - I
would have lost the whole lot.
Sorry - this isnt good news - but you appear to have a more severe
problem than I had. I think you ought to try and get as much off the
disk as possible then start over.... You will eventually waste more time trying to recover than starting out now and re-installing.

I fo not notice any diffenece in performance with FA32 over NTFS-
NTFS is well fancier in its file system behaviour - but the drwabacks
are something I can well do without...

Cheers
and Good luck
(:-(

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