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Partition table got switched with another drive!

My windows 2k box has two drives, 80 and 60gb. 2k was on the 80. i pulled the 80 to put it in my mac, tried to install 2k on the 60gb drive. To make a long story short, the installer hosed the drive. It would get to the first reboot, but it wouldn't reboot ino the GUI installer, just sit there at the "press ny key to boot from cd". Reinstalled the 80 to boot back up in 2k. 2k sees the 60 as "invalid file system". norton says the same thing. Tried FIXMBR, fdisk /mbr. No help. If I let one disk recovery tool to "trust the drive's parition table is correct", results in a display of a 78gb partition and a 1.6gb parition, the state my 80 used to be in, before i formatted it in my mac, then moved it back to the pc so I could reinstall 2k on it to boot . (Formatting the 60gb is not an option right now). The data is not imporant enought to warrant in house disk recovery. Anyone ever battle a hosed partition table? Any ideas?

SysExpert

1) Norton Utils or similar for win2k ( McAfee and ontrack also )

Also -
Here are some tools that might help

Lost partition table , bad partition recover partition , data recovery
well, actually i've found a solution by myself...

I booted from a linux floppy and recovered the partitions using the 'gpart' program.
it scans the whole disk and reconstructs the mbr.

From: shekerra Date: 04/26/2001 11:39AM PST
Find partitions utility:
http://inet.uni2.dk/~svolaf/utilities.htm

MBRWork from:
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/utilities.html
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q253/7/74.ASP partition info guide to partitions

This article contains common questions and answers about the FAT32 file system in Windows 95 OEM Service

The Four Steps Needed to Make a Hard Disk Usable format fdisk preparation of new drive
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q66/7/06.ASP partitioning
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I hope this helps !

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newwavepro

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SysExpert

ALso check
http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecovery/ has a demo that will recover up to 5 files
http://www.ontrack.com/buyonline/

There is also a professional version that works with win2k.

I hope this helps !

Asta Cu

Curious if you happen to be running McAfee and using a Laptop; since I just read that the driver could be a piece of the problem. Here's a cut/paste from McAfee FAQ:
This issue can be caused by a particular driver version for the Synaptics TouchPad, found on most laptop/notebook computers. Please contact your computer manufacturer, or the retail store from where you purchased the computer, to find out where you can update this driver. Once the driver has been updated, return to the website and retry the installation of Personal Firewall.

Asta

cempasha

Hi gte196h
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