Virus? USB 500GB external hard disk is now "raw format"

ralph was thinking very hard :
Here is where I am.
The controller is good and the disk itself has not crashed.
So I created a systemrecoverycd boot cd which can freely recover all
photographs regardless of the fat32 tables.
The dd took 7 hours but now I have a duplicate disk to work with (keeping
the original pristine).
I'm looking up the photo-recovery feature of the latest systemrecoverycd.

Thanks Ralph, good luck.

In rec.photo.digital ralph wrote:

| I am not sure what to do with the systemrecoverycd but I noticed it still
| thinks the sdc is 1 terabyte (which surprised me as everyone said it would
| "look" like 500 megabytes at this time).

Can you get a web page that gives specifications for the EXACT model of drive
you actually have? I'm wondering if maybe its one of those boxes that has 2
drives of 500 GB, and arranges them in a RAID configuration, and the RAID
configuration somehow got changed from level 1 (mirrored presenting a single
500GB space) to level 0 (concatenated presenting all the space as 1 TB).

It may be that the RAID is done in Windows driver software, and then Linux
will NOT see that configuration. Maybe Windows doesn't see it now, either.

--
|WARNING: Due to extreme spam, googlegroups.com is blocked. Due to ignorance |
| by the abuse department, bellsouth.net is blocked. If you post to |
| Usenet from these places, find another Usenet provider ASAP. |
| Phil Howard KA9WGN (email for humans: first name in lower case at ipal.net) |

On Sun 30 Nov08 20:07, wrote in
:

In rec.photo.digital ralph wrote:

| I am not sure what to do with the systemrecoverycd but I noticed it
| still thinks the sdc is 1 terabyte (which surprised me as everyone
| said it would "look" like 500 megabytes at this time).

Can you get a web page that gives specifications for the EXACT model
of drive you actually have? I'm wondering if maybe its one of those
boxes that has 2 drives of 500 GB, and arranges them in a RAID
configuration, and the RAID configuration somehow got changed from
level 1 (mirrored presenting a single 500GB space) to level 0
(concatenated presenting all the space as 1 TB).

It may be that the RAID is done in Windows driver software, and then
Linux will NOT see that configuration. Maybe Windows doesn't see it
now, either.


Hi Phil, this situation seems to be getting more and more involved!

Surely the FIRST thing to do is post (crosspost if appropriate) to the
IBM storage group. This will be to the chagrin of some regular posters
in ACF.

Next is NOT to blindly run a defrag, scandisk or fdisk in hope that one
of them might do something useful because they can each cause damage in
this situation.

Then, as you say, restore the MBR. Apart from the Microsoft partition ID
sig, all the MBR can probably be recovered if there are still partitions
on the drive at all. The Storage group can advise what automated
software they will talk him thru. Svend provides Findpart (which is
freeware) but his tools often need reasonable user expertise.

http://www.partitionsupport.com/utilities.htm

I'll assume the PBS is ok although it seems this drive has had a failure
in both system areas and file areas. Next is a choice between (a)
checking which of the two FATs is in the best condition and ISTR Findpart
may also do this or (b) seeing what damaged sectors there are.

There are lots of architectural limits occurring here. I forget all the
details: XP will access the hard drive itself even beyond the 137 GB
limit but ISTR version 6.22 of MS's Fdisk/format wont create or format a
partition bigger than 32GB but version 7 will. Either could be on a W98
system. MS's Scandisk & defrag are limited to 127 GB. The W98 system
may not be able to see beyond 137 GB of the drive (48 bit LBA arrived
with ATA-6). So who knows what happened as part of this HDD's setup or
how it managed to work in practise. The lost clusters now being picked
up by scandisk are not a good sign because they might have been needed in
a repair.

To have a guess *maybe* this drive has been moved between systems with
different HDD addressing conventions or there has been some unwelcome
changes made in the motherboard settings. Or maybe surface damage
instead that didn't automatically get mapped out for some reason.

The Storage group might talk the OP thru this. I've seen Svend walk a
user thru recovery but that was some years ago and he may not be able to
now.