Is there a doctor in the house? (data recovery help needed)

[Jaepheth]

ok, so I turn off my computer and the next day I turn it on and while it's booting I get I/O error, please replace disk and hit any key. so i booted up using my windows cd

while attempting to save my disk, I ran a windows restore console which is sort of like a castrated version of dos, but anyway, the harddrive that crashed was divided into two partitions, only the first partition was unreadable, I tried running the repair master boot record, and now i can't read the second partition.

I switch the master and slave drives and finally get my computer to boot. and windows says that the harddrive has 0 bytes and is in RAW format, Maxtor's MaxBlast utility says that the harddrive is in FAT16 format, and only has 35GB available (It's an 80G drive)

What I think happened is somehow, the file allocation table was corrupted, resulting in the first problem of not being able to read the drive, then when I repaired the master boot record, the drive forgot it had a second partition. Now, I have a drive which thinks it's total space is only equal to the first partition, and the second partition is still there, but is hidden.

What I want, is to save the data from both partitions. I haven't formatted the drive, so the data should be recoverable. I was wondering if any of you guys knew of any good utilities or tricks that could help me in this quest.

PS I think the first partition was NTFS and the second partition FAT32... or maybe the other way around, not sure if that matters or not.

[Ace Pace]

If you can change the size, and have a partition set aside (at the end of the drive), use gbr or whatever its name was (check the G&C history, I had a similer problem), it has high rates of recovery.

[Pu-239]

If you have a second [larger]hard drive, run an imaging utility to back the whole thing onto a second hard drive, then try parted from a KNOPPIX CD. "dd" might work, but is massively space intensive, Looks like your partition table is corrupted,

Anyway if it's a spontaneous error for no reason, it may be signs of a dying harddrive.