Reocvering lost logical volumes
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I know it's not really a programming question, but I figure there's enough smart people around here that maybe someone knows a solution. I have an old hard drive that had Windows XP installed on it and had a couple logical volumes on it. In the process of trying to install Linux to be able to dual boot, I completely lost the ability to boot into that install of Windows. I now have a new hard drive running XP. The new install can see the old drive and has full access to the first logical volume, but it can't see the second and third ones. The drive listing in My Computer shows that drive as having a total size of about 100 GB, but Disk Management lists the drive as having a single 232 GB partition. I found a utility (PC Inspector, http://www.pcinspector.de/) that can find the lost logical volumes, but it gave an error when I tried to copy the files off the drive. Does anybody have any other ideas, such as some other Windows utility or even a Linux utility that would be on a LiveCD?
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There's a company http://www.runtime.org that makes data recovery applications. I've used two of their programs to recover various things, from accidentally deleting 30GB of music to losing a striped RAID array. I was able to recover > 99% of the data in both cases with it. Might be something useful. Of course these apps costs money, and I'm sure there are linux apps around that can fix this. I tried various linux apps to recover data on my RAID, but nothing worked unfortunately.
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I recently suffered a corrupt software RAID (mirror) in Windows 2003 Server, and was able to recover it with Acronis Disk Director Server[1]. It allowed me to recover 'deleted' partitions from a dynamic volume and recover them as normal partitions which allowed me to access them via windows. Please note that there are two versions, for you the normal[2] version will do. If you're going to use this software; You'll have to recover one partition at a time, so dont be alarmed when you'll only see one partition, once you recovered the first one the next one will show up (why? you're guess is as good as mine...)
There are other[3] ways which might save you money, but I was not able to get this to work, perhaps to much corruption, I don't know. A ghost image cant hurt if you were to try that I recon...
P.S.: If you are ever to go down the datarecovery road, getdataback from runtime isnt a bad option indeed.
[1] http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/products/diskdirector/
[2] http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/diskdirector/
[3] http://thelazyadmin.com/index.php?/archives/161-Converting-Dynamic-Disks-Back-to-Basic-Disks.html
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@skippy said:
There's a company http://www.runtime.org that makes data recovery applications. I've used two of their programs to recover various things, from accidentally deleting 30GB of music to losing a striped RAID array. I was able to recover > 99% of the data in both cases with it. Might be something useful. Of course these apps costs money, and I'm sure there are linux apps around that can fix this. I tried various linux apps to recover data on my RAID, but nothing worked unfortunately.
I too have had nothing but success from Runtime. I have used GetDataBack for NTFS from them on a couple of occassions. Last I checked, their "trial" version was pretty much fully functional. It doesn't allow you to recover files en masse, but you can recover them individually. The trial version will at least let you see if they are recoverable, then let you weigh the option of paying for the full version vs. the cost of losing or having to recreate your work.
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When you mean logical volumes, do you mean volumes in the extended partition? Or do you mean you coverted your disk to "Dynamic"?
You might have accidentally deleted the partitions containing those drives in the process of installing linux, probably because the installer correctly identified the first as "Windows" and made you aware of it, but didn't distinguish the fact that the rest of those partitions were significant to windows also, and didn't adequately warn you when you nixed them to make space.
Do you remember what type of partitioning activities you tried to do before installing linux? (Or do you remember what questions and answers you provided during the linux installation process when it asked about partitions?)
