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OT hard drive recovery

Hi,

A bit off topic but I'm looking for some advice on harddrive recovery. I ran out of motherboard SATA ports when buying a new HD, and had a RAID PCI-e card laying around with some SATA ports on it that could be used for non RAID, so figured I would try to hook my CD-ROM up to it and free up one of the motherboard SATA ports. After rebooting with this configuration I have a problem with one of my 2TB HD drives that has become unreadable RAW format, and is showing up as two partitions now (900+GB each) when viewed with multiple different recovery software, but before it was a single partition. The RAID card is a SiI3132 & 3132 - PCI Express (1x) to 2 Port SATA300. Is it even possible that the PCIe card could have messed with a HD plugged into the motherboard SATA? There are two other harddrives in the computer and only the one HD has this problem. I was just getting ready to buy a new HD to backup the two 2TB drives so terrible timing doh!

cheers, Jamie

Reply to
Jamie M
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undo the changes you made see if that helps.

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Reply to
Jasen Betts

Norton? Maybe the MBR backup can be restored. I'd do a sector to sector clone first, then experiment on that image.

Cheers

Reply to
Martin Riddle

If the PCIe card has an onboard BIOS, it's possible that the BIOS tried to "initialize" the cards plugged into it in some way... and if it was using the main PC BIOS I/O routines (rather than talking directly to the SiI3132 controller on the board) the requests might have gone to the wrong drive at the PC BIOS level.

Alternatively, your operating system might have become confused by the sudden appearance of new drives, or old drives in new places. Depending on how the OS and BIOS "enumerate" the drives, it's possible that the presence of the CD-ROM on the add-on card had the effect of "renumbering" the other drives... once again, requests which some software intended to go to one drive might have gone to another.

If your PC BIOS was configured to give "drives in plug-in controllers" priority over "drives connected to on-the-motherboard controllers" then some confusion of this sort might have happened.

What OS and version did you boot?

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Reply to
Dave Platt

512-byte or 4096-byte sectors?

If the drive has 4096-byte physical sectors, the reported logical sector size depends upon the controller. It may report either 512-byte or 4096-byte sectors. 512-byte sectors have better compatibility but worse efficiency (writing a single 512-byte sector involves a read-modify-write cycle).

The partition table stores partition data (start and length) in units of sectors. If you attach the drive to a controller which reports 512-byte sectors, partition the drive, then re-attach it to a controller which reports 4096-byte sectors, the BIOS/OS will misinterpret the partition table. If this is the case, you just need to edit the partition table with a program which doesn't modify any other part of the disc (Linux' fdisk is fine), either multiplying or dividing all sector-based values by a factor of 8.

I can't be sure that this is your problem, but it's common for 2TB drives to use 4096-byte sectors, and I had a similar problem using such a drive in an external enclosure. The enclosure has both USB and eSATA connectors; connecting it via USB results in the enclosure's SATA-USB bridge reporting 512-byte sectors, while connecting it via eSATA results in the mobo's SATA controller reporting 4096-byte sectors.

Reply to
Nobody

Hi,

It is Windows 7 64bit. I think the PCIe card does have the onboard BIOS, as during boot up a prompt comes up "press F4 to configure the RAID card" or something to that effect. I actually did press F4 to just take a look, didn't change anything - but I think thats where the harddrive got messed up most likely.

cheers, Jamie

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Reply to
Jamie M

Hi,

It was NTFS with 4096-byte sectors.

Thanks, I'll maybe mess around with the partition table after doing a full drive backup from recovery software.

cheers, Jamie

>
Reply to
Jamie M

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