[Pc_Support] File Recovery Windows 2000 - RESOLVED !

[Aaron Morrison]

On 22 Sep 2005 at 2:09, BBBB wrote:

> My drive and all my data is back. What a relief.
> 
> I tried SpinRite first. It showed the data on the drive was good but when I
> rebooted I still couldn't
> open the drive. I may have missed something.
> TestDisk fixed the partition.
> 
> Thanks for the help.
> 
> Bradley


Glad it worked.  

And just to clarify a bit what happened, you had a OS failure 
(Windows in this case), not a drive failure.  

As an analogy, think of the drive as a book.  You can think of the 
parition table as a "table of contents" of sorts.  And each partition 
can be thought of as a chapter in the book.  Like the table of 
contents in a book, the partition table is always in the same place 
with a defined format.  Chapters can start anywhere in a book and can 
be written in any number of different languages.  The language of a 
chapter is akin to partition types (of which filesystems are 
related).

Spinrite takes the pages of the book and makes sure that all of the 
characters are printed correctly.  It doesn't read the book to make 
sense of the page, it just makes sure that the characters and 
sentences look right.  If it can't make out the text on the page, it 
will rip the page out and put in a new one from the spare pages in 
back of the book.

TestDisk on the other hand actually knows a bit of how books are 
layed out and what languages are used.  It will scan the book looking 
for chapters (partitions), making note of the starting and ending 
page numbers and what language it's in (partition types), and it will 
then completely re-write the table of contents (partition table) with 
the information it found.   

In your case Windows puked on the table of contents (the partition 
table).   It's happened to me as well.

So Spinrite and TestDisk are different tools for different jobs. 
(They just both work on books. <grin>) I hope this helps you 
understand what happened and why it worked.

--am