Thailand Expats

LivinLOS · #1 06-05-2005, 12:41

Screwing around the other day I seem to have trashed the partition tables on my laptop.. For some ungodly reason none of the rescue solutions I can come up with are working and (for many complex reasons) I am having no luck running partition magic from boot / rescue CD's

The very easy solution would be to rip the drive from the laptop bung it in one of my desktops and tidy it up to one (valuable to me) NTSC bootable partition..

Of course to do this I need a 2.5 inch drive adapter when I moved house I had one, but it and a 20GB laptop hard disc have fallen into that magical hole from where you never see them again..

A spin to Phuket town and Big C has failed and ordering from BKK is going to take too long (can pick on up in Pantip on Monday but I need data on the laptop right now)...

So do any expats have a 2.5 inch laptop IDE adapter (long shot !!!) and if not any idea where or who might have one in stock or to borrow ?? I know its a weird item and I know this is a long shot, its the kind of little odd thing I always have in my hardware bin but the recent house move has stuffed me..

Nicke · #2 06-05-2005, 12:59

I am not much of help since I dont have that item but I know how you feel.

Despite I do backups regulary (Between different harddisks/computers) I also lost lot of work files in a hard disk crash in December last year.

LivinLOS · #3 06-05-2005, 13:56

The data is all there is just that the partition is over the limit that is possible to be bootable (at least thats why I assume it doesnt book) and doing another instal in the initial part of the drive is not getting picked up..

To be honest I dont think the drive is 100% healthy but it was fine until I wiped out an old win2k install on the start of the drive..

stevem · #4 06-05-2005, 16:53

Sorry cant help with that item, but a place which seems to be able pull parts of their ****, is a shop on Phag Na Road, down from Silk Air. Not sure about the name, but they have "Acer" signs all over the front.

LivinLOS · #5 06-05-2005, 17:10

I really dont have the time now...

As always there is just one thing (a single long email) on that machine that I need.. anything else is on my desk and the lap could be fixed anytime without pressure... Of course that one email I need now !!

Nicke · #6 06-05-2005, 17:43

So what did you install instead of Win2K? If the computer could boot from the HD in the past I dont understand why it isnt possible now, unless the you changed the size of the boot partition.

Good luck anyway to solve this problem.

Quote:

Originally Posted by LivinLOS

The data is all there is just that the partition is over the limit that is possible to be bootable (at least thats why I assume it doesnt book) and doing another instal in the initial part of the drive is not getting picked up..

To be honest I dont think the drive is 100% healthy but it was fine until I wiped out an old win2k install on the start of the drive..

LivinLOS · #7 06-05-2005, 18:03

Long story...

What happened was had a win2k part on there which was the 1st drive and had the boot.ini which default called XP on the second partition with 1 sec delay, I cant remember when I last used 2k but the HD was large enough to leave it in case of a 'missing file'..

The XP partition even set active wont boot because its past that sector that a drive neeeds to be below to be bootable..

So formatting the 2k part during a fresh xp install (the other one is old and bogged down with 2 years of crud installs) cleared the boot ini and halfway through the install process XP choked..

The other thing is the part table has got a problem.. I have tried a few linux iso self contained install ideas to then run fdisks etc and they are reporting errors... I have installed a few different MBR tools but none have saved it so far.. So many things also working against me like having 3 desktops and this laptop but not a single floppy disk drive to make partition magic boot disks (or read those discs to make a boot CD) the stupid makers of part magic assume that a rescue disc has to be a floppy which in this day is nuts (what good is 1.44MB storage device)...

Like the end of the italian job... I have an idea (famous last words)...

t0rn · #8 06-05-2005, 23:57

Of no help at all to you now but is pretty cheap and easy to get an external usb disk drive and take regular ghost images of your laptop to that.

Can your laptop boot from a usb pen thing - that might let you get the data off.

LivinLOS · #9 07-05-2005, 09:17

I have nearly a terrabyte of storage in the house so its not a question of space.. Simply maintaining solid backups.

Nothing much on that laptop was vital (except this email !!!) so I had no backup system in place..

Made some progress.. Now boots to one partition but the drive is being screwed.. Tools report damage to the drive (excessive shock) even though it was fine.. PM8 / and other tools choke and the IBM drive tools for it are saying forget it..

Time for a new HD !!!

banger_chris · #10 09-05-2005, 01:59

Hi!

Search the web for an application named "R-Studio". Recovers Files on broken partitions etc. Very reliable as im using it by myself on a regular basis at my work.

fatboy · #11 09-05-2005, 17:15

Quote:

Originally Posted by banger_chris

Hi!

Search the web for an application named "R-Studio". Recovers Files on broken partitions etc. Very reliable as im using it by myself on a regular basis at my work.

R-Studio is good (www.r-tt.com). Also has an app (R-Studio Agent Emergency) that you can boot up on (if you can burn a bootable CD) and network with another PC that has R-Studio installed on it to recover and transfer files. The demo has a file size limit of 64K though.