PCA Forums

I set up three computers at home on a Linksys going to a cable modem. All was well in Jah's Network Land until I tried installing a simple sound driver on my Win2k Server box. Big mistake!

The system would not load regularly, in safe mode or from the last good config. It just blue-screened and showed an error message about failure to load the ks.sys driver. I renamed this file, but I got another driver error, and figured this would continue indefinitely if I simply removed the failing drivers. After mucking with the repair console for a while, which by the way sucks, I reinstalled the OS and got the GUI back. (AFAIK, the registry can't be modified from this console, as only command.exe programs will execute such as RENAME, COPY, ENABLE, DISABLE, LISTSVC, etc.)

So far so good...except one of my four disk partitions containing most of my important files was not recognized, and this was not the OS partition but the last and largest containing my most important data files.

When I looked in Disk Management, the drive showed up as before, but this information might be cached. Using a tool called Getdataback for NTFS, I have been able to get to the files. I see all that were there plus a bunch of hidden ones that appear to be partition information. With this program, I am able to recover the files to my other partitions but not restore the partition as is.

The main beef with simply reformatting and reinstalling is that I have a few important software packages, such as Visual Studio, that were installed at work, and I don't have back-ups.

Any chance I could restore the partition "in place" or should I simply back up everything and start from square one?

Hard disk & win2k gurus please help me out. Preferably, I would like to avoid a recovery software purchase, so if anyone knows good share or freeware that will do the trick, please let me know. Also, I have a SQL Server running that I need for my work at home. Any tips, suggestions, black magic rituals, software, links, insults or karate moves would be appreciated. Thanks again.

Jah

Okay first off ALWAYS make a repair data disk before installing any new hardware or driver. That way you can boot from the CD, run a repair and restore the registry the way it was.

It's too late now but I think you could have fixed the original install even without this. If it was a driver screwing up you could have disabled or removed it in the Device Manager from Safe Mode. There's some other tricks too. Keep it in mind for the future - we could have helped walk you throughthat here.


The reason you probably can't access the partition is because using NTFS the partition is restricted to the original user account that created it. When you re-installed Win2K, the NTFS security probably locked you out. This is one reason I DO NOT recommend using NTFS on a home install of Win2K or XP (and even most office installs). FAT32 is no slower to access and has the benefit that you can access your files from a Win98 boot floppy in an emergency. NTFS is for file security features which you really don't need except on a server and on workstations where security is an issue.


Okay, I assume you've already re-installed Visual Studio, etc? Because you CAN'T recover the old installation of VS if that's what you think - it's gone. There are DLL files that were installed in your system folder, and registry settings and you can't get them back. It's just like Office - you can't just copy the old office folder over - you MUST re-install it if you're re-installed the OS. Ditto for SQL. All this must be installed from the installation CDs. Sorry.


So if I understand you correctly, you have Win2K working fine now BUT you can't access this big data partition or even reformat it and you don't want to re-install Win2K to fix it, right?

You should be able to delete the partition and make a new one. Try it from within Win2K's Disk Management first.

If that doesn't work, a partitioning utility like Partition Magic will do it for you (not free I'm afraid). Disk Management should be able to delete it and then create a new partition though.

Hope this helps...