Hi Guys,

I've got a fairly new HDD here [around 4 months old] which has failed and reports a strange error in Spinrite.
Spinrite is saying the Parttion is larger than the drive, and to correct the problem before continuing.

I believe the drive has been corupted by a bad/faulity IDE channel on the Motherboard.
As it now won't find any drive plugged into that channel.

Has anyone come across this problem before ?
Or better still have an answer that will let me get some of my data back.

Thanks in advance Guys.

Does the drive not work on any other channel?

You may be able to run a data recovery program like GetDataBack or something like that. I was only able to get 1/4-1/3 of my stuff back when my MBR died on my HDD but it's worth a shot.

Hi CptMurphy,

I've tried it two other PC's now.
Both BIOS's find and identify it fine.
Windows see's it but can't access it, says it needs to be formated.

Spinrite, Acronis, Ontrack, and Disk Commander either claim the partition is too large for the disk, or that its out of range.

I tried repairing the MBR but that didn't make any difference, and I've scanned the drive for bad sectors again it comes back as being fine.

I think it must be the partition table thats wrong, but I can't find much info on fixing that.

ya its been corrupted. this has happened to me before. acronis reported my 80gig hdd as like 700gigs+
you will have to format it, but as said earlier, try to run a data recovery program on it. plug it into another comp and do it that way.

Even after you reformat it the data should be recoverable. I've done this before successfully with the following software:
FinalData Enterprise v2.0
Runtime GetDataBack
R-Studio

They are payware but you get what you pay for, beyond a shadow of a doubt.

ya you definetly can format it first but there is still the chance of losing data..

Thanks for the help and support guys.

I've never formated a drive and then tried to recover its data, it all sounds very scarey

But, if thats the only way. I'll have to give it a go.
Having said that I think I'll wait till the weekend. That'll give some time to read up on whats involved and get some beers for either courage or celebrating.

I'll report back on Monday with my results.
Thanks again Guys.

I would do the data recovery before formating else your file names will be named like file numbers and not with the file name, so, unless you don´t want to rename the whole recovery then I would format after the data recovery .

Hi Guys,
So much for my weekend project...
I had the simple choice of going shopping for things we 'must' get this weekend.
Or trying to recover the data and sleeping on the couch for the next month.

So I'm going to have a go at this later in the week.
One thing that is confusing me, is what would be the best way to format the drive ?
My guess would be a quick format, but would a Fat32 format be less destructive ?
Or should I stick to a NTFS format, as thats what the drive is at the moment ?


Hi PuntoMX,

I've tried every program and Util I could find, but none of them will read the drive or correct the Partition/Drive size problem. So i'm stuck with formatting first.

If you have a problem with "wrong" partition entries, your best bet is TESTDISK:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Do NOT format the drive before using it.

Also, read this:
http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=84345
for a general "howto" for approaching the problem.

jaclaz

Quick Update

I've been playing with this drive most of the evening.
The good news is I've got almost half the data back. But I haven't stopped yet,


One piece of advice I was given.
That has clearly worked, although I have no idea why ???
But I feel is worth passing on to all the guys who have offered me help here.

Beg, Borrow, or Steal an old Single Drive IDE cable [the old 40pin type]
Use that to connect the Faulty HDD to the Primary IDE connector and set the drive to Master.
Connect the boot drive and/or CD/DVD of the PC to the Secondary IDE connector [adjust BIOS if needed]

Doing this allowed most of my old recovery utils to see and to access the drive. No more errors about the partition being bigger than the drive. I'm going to try some the utils you guys have posted here, to see if I have any more luck.


Thanks for all your help and advice guys.
This forum truely has some fantasic information and incredable people on it.

Likely a bad IDE cable connection! Especially if the BIOS gives the HDD a weird and random name.

Also, especially if Windows gives you error messages about a parity error of the IDE channel in the system event log!