Active Drive

**Kodiak** · April 25th, 2006, 01:47 PM

I have a drive here with some valuable data that was a boot drive in a pc and the registry was corupted and could not run any sort of repair or anything on it so I pulled it and put it in my machine to recover the data however it says it is active and will not give it a drive letter for me to get data off of it and if I go to manage disk drives it will only give me the option to delete the partition in which case the data will be lost. Any idea what I can do here to recover some data off it?

**merlinsghost** · April 25th, 2006, 05:56 PM

Try using Fdisk or gdisk. </shotinthedark>

Good luck.

**Kodiak** · April 25th, 2006, 11:50 PM

I took it to a local shop here and they were able to recover it. Tell me, what do they use to recover data. It was only a small PC shop and I feel I should of been able to do this. I tried restore 2000 with no luck myself.

**gemstone** · April 26th, 2006, 12:12 AM

I always use an IDE to USB adapter that comes with a power supply for about £25, it doesn't matter what type of partition is on the drive, because it comes in via a USB port it gets a letter regardless and the data can be got at easily. Doubtless there are other ways but keeping peoples data safe is a big part of what I do when upgrading or fixing, rather than take a chance on the systems possible corruption of the data I plug this adapter in to the drive and make an Acronis image of it before even booting the PC the drive is in, you dont even need to remove the drive from the case, just unplug the current cables and slap the adapter in, plug into a running PC and get backing.

Most useful bit of kit I think I got.

**Kodiak** · April 26th, 2006, 09:29 AM

That is exactly what I did but it would not give me a drive letter. It would show as a health (Active) drive in disk managment. Not a Health (basic) or Healthy (Dinamic). It was active and would not give me a letter no way. I put it in a external inclosure and as a slave in a machine I use for this and nothing. From what I'm gathering GoBack was the cause of the problem so maybe it was the reason it would not give me a drive letter also.

**Shard92** · April 26th, 2006, 11:01 AM

IF go-back was the cause of your problem then you could try getdataback for your appropriate file system ( fat or ntfs ) you can download the software and try it to see what it can recover before you have to pay for it....

the software is available here:

http://www.runtime.org/

**Kodiak** · April 26th, 2006, 11:33 AM

I tried restorer2000 and it recovered some data however it would not let me into the data. Is getdataback better then restorer2000?

Edit: We are going to replace this drive so I'm going to bring it home and do some software testing on it for future use. If I find something that works I will buy it.

**arch0nmyc0n** · April 26th, 2006, 12:40 PM

I HATE Go-Back.... it's caused me so many problems in the past... including this one...

I can't seem to find a link to the page, but just before the machine boots from the hard drive there is a key combination you can use to remove the goback boot sector entry... if I remember correctly it's Control-Alt-G... I've had data loss in some cases doing this, it was on machine the hard drive wasn't functioning quite properly anymore...

**Kodiak** · April 26th, 2006, 09:58 PM

Well I brought the drive home and plugged it into my external drive and it now gives itself a drive letter so they was able to get theis drive to function correctly and thats what I would like to figure out. Is goback causing this and they was able to remove goback with only the drive in there possesion or could thay have used partition magic or like software to repartition it and recover the data?

**PBase001** · April 27th, 2006, 07:20 AM

Partition Manager is a free download to try and you could set a drive active or inactive.

http://www.partition-manager.com/demo.htm

**Kodiak** · April 27th, 2006, 08:00 AM

Sorry to say it is to late to try anything since the other shop was able to recover it and now I can see it as a normal drive. Thought maybe there was someone out there that knows the drill and could fill me in on how this waas done incase I see this again but I will log the info in what I have left of a brain. I believe this is one area I'm most interest in. (data recovery) Thanks for the help guys.

**PBase001** · April 27th, 2006, 08:12 AM

Okay the demo will not apply changes, sorry.

I actually went into windows disk management and changed one of my drives to active, reboot and was booting to the wrong drive with no system files.

Used my bootable Hiren boot CD and actually used Partition Manager to fix the problem.

So, Partition Manager personal edition will cost you US $50 on their website.

---

I don't have the time to play around with this for now, but it's freeware...

http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/mbrtool.htm

It's suppose to allow you to change MBR attributes, including the active and hidden attributes.

---

Quick run through of the mbrtool manual shows that it seems very possible...

/PTM - change attribute for partitions that are listed in the MBR, either in the original MBR or a backup.
A disk must be selected (/DSK:0 - /DSK:3). If /SEC:x or /FIL:filename is not used, the original MBR is selected. This option can be used to change the attribute for the selected partition. Use the command as follows : /PTM:XyXyXyXy, where X is the selected action (A for activate, D for de-activate, H for hide, U for unhide, Z for zap) and y is the selected partition (1-4).
Example : /PTM:A2H1. This will activate partition 2 and hide partition 1.
This option can be used as a quick boot selector for multiple primary partitions, or to hide and unhide partitions without having to use a partition manager.

**arch0nmyc0n** · April 27th, 2006, 09:24 AM

Originally Posted by Kodiak

Sorry to say it is to late to try anything since the other shop was able to recover it and now I can see it as a normal drive. Thought maybe there was someone out there that knows the drill and could fill me in on how this waas done incase I see this again but I will log the info in what I have left of a brain. I believe this is one area I'm most interest in. (data recovery) Thanks for the help guys.

Was my reply invisible?

While I can't find the page, there is a set buttons you press when the machine accesses the boot record (I'm pretty sure it was control-alt-g) to remove the goback entry from the boot record. This allows the drive to be accessed by another machine... I've done this numerous times (but I still need the sheet to remind me the key combo, and the sheet is missing now)and most of the time the stuff is safe, I've only lost data three times so far...

**Kodiak** · April 27th, 2006, 10:45 AM

Originally Posted by arch0nmyc0n

Was my reply invisible?

While I can't find the page, there is a set buttons you press when the machine accesses the boot record (I'm pretty sure it was control-alt-g) to remove the goback entry from the boot record. This allows the drive to be accessed by another machine... I've done this numerous times (but I still need the sheet to remind me the key combo, and the sheet is missing now)and most of the time the stuff is safe, I've only lost data three times so far...

No I seen this and it is great info and appreciated. If you could find the documentation that would be great. The other techs had only the drive and was able to do this and that would be great info also. One of them said the procedure was on the Norton site but I could not find it.

**Shard92** · April 27th, 2006, 11:08 AM

Not being the one who did it, I can't tell you how THEY did it but sometimes you can get go-back off as arch says or you pull the data off with a program much like getdataback and then repartition and reformat the drive and then put the data back....