On Monday I woke up full of plans for the day – only to find my PC wouldn’t boot. Aaargh. A quick look in the BIOS showed – or rather didn’t show – one of my hard disks to be unrecognised. OK – now’s a good time to kick myself for not organising some sort of backup…
So with feelings of dread – I set about trying to see just how much of a mess my hard disk was in. Case open – seemed to be spinning – so something was happening…
Ok let’s try a linux boot CD, see if we can see anything from there… nope.
Ok lets try a parition magic boot disk and see what we get? success, I can see the drive and I can see the partitions. I run a few checks which all report OK. next step then is to get a new drive – then I should in theory be able to copy the partitions into the unallocated space and – fingers crossed – all should be well.
I bought a new disk, got it home, opened it. Doh! should have read the label on the box more carefully, I had a SATA not a PATA drive (I had never noticed that IDE had been renamed!). Took it back, got the IDE drive, popped it in the machine, fired up partition magic and – after several hours copying the partitions the data is all there and good. Now I just have to write a new master boot record for the drive and all will be well.
Oh yeah, and I had to set a flag in windoze registry to allow LBA-48 so that windoze would see all 320GB of the new drive.