[Pc_Support] File Recovery Windows 2000

[patrick]

BBBB wrote:

>While saving an email as a file, my PC locked up hard. I had to hit the
>reset switch to restart.
>When the PC booted up I had lost a drive partition. The drive letter still
>shows up in windows and knoppix but as
>unformatted. There are about 8 gigs of data that I would like to recover.
>Partition Magic also reports
>this as unformatted. This is the first 8 gigs of a 30 gig drive.The rest of
>the drive seems to be working fine.
>I believe it was formatted fat32.
>  I think this may be a good candidate for a file recovery tool.
>Can someone reccomend a good program for this?
>
>Thanks,
>Bradley
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Pc_support mailing list
>Pc_support at matrixlist.com
>http://lists.matrixlist.com/mailman/listinfo/pc_support
>
>  
>
FAT32 has done that to me, too.  Closed source, so I never did find out 
what command was exercised by the virus that did it!

My "solution" was to install Knoppix on the "non-existant" partition, 
simply accepting that the data was lost forever.  Luckily, I had copied 
most of the important stuff to another drive on my network, and on my 
system.

BUT!  For a last desperate attempt to read that partition, did you try 
to mount it in Knoppix?  If it doesn't show up, the FAT is corrupted for 
that drive.  Perhaps there is a FAT recovery tool?  Ther are two FAT 
files, though Partition Magic seems to follow the M$ pattern to ONLY 
read the first FAT, and to try to restore from the first FAT, using the 
second FAT only to compare and report when the first FAT is bad.

A good system tool would read the second FAT, to permit some recovery. 

I will bet someone else has a better answer.  But, I have switched to 
using reiserFS in Linux. and saving anything on my network that was in a 
FAT or FAT32 partition, there.  BTW, AVG is free, and found four trojan 
viruses on one FAT drive today, on a kid gaming XP Pro system on my 
network. 

I'll be watching for answers, cuz that problem of the disappearing 
partition in FAT and FAT32 is a really bad thing!