Your First Step in Data Recovery

Kenn's
Tech
Notes

20010501: Your First Step in Data Recovery

May/2001
Tech Note #1

Tip of the Month! There are occasions when a partition on a hard drive becomes inaccessible. If a drive has lost a partition, or has been repartitioned and formatted in error, or if the boot record has become corrupt, the system may be unbootable or FDISK may report there are no partitions or a newly-formatted partition may show zero files present. Depending on the specifics of the problem, you may want to try FDISK /MBR to reinitialize the master boot record. But if FDISK /MBR doesn't fix the problem, you are headed down the road to either data recovery or data abandonment.

The high-quality data recovery programs that are available all come with a price, but there is one free utility that is very simple to use and can retrieve lost data in certain circumstances. FP.SYS by Svend Olaf Mikkelsen is a DOS device driver that adds read-only drive letters for lost FAT partitions. To use it, you simply copy it to a DOS boot disk, and add the line:
device=fp.sys
to your config.sys file.

If the drive you wish to access is not drive 1, add the drive number to the line, as in:
device=fp.sys 2
to access drive 2.

Boot from that disk, and the device driver will look for lost FAT partitions. If it finds any, it will mount them as read-only drive letters. You can then copy off any intact files to another drive. If the lost partition is (or may be) FAT32, make sure your DOS disk is Windows 95B or newer. This driver does not recognize NTFS partitions.

Important: If you have a newly-formatted partition C: on drive 1, and you want to recover files from a lost partition also on drive 1, DON'T copy the files to C:\! Use a network drive, second hard drive, floppy drive, Jaz drive, Zip drive, or other drive to recover your files to. Because the read-only access to the "phantom" partition is accessing sectors on the same physical medium as your C: partition, it is very possible to overwrite the very file(s) you are trying to recover!

You can download this utility from Svend's Utilities web page. There is also a copy in the programs folder at the shop ftp site.

A text file in the zipped archive has more detailed information regarding the driver. This utility is not a comprehensive data recovery solution, but it is a quick and easy first step, and the price is right.

DISCLAIMER: This document is intended for the reference of computer support personnel within Winnipeg School Division No. 1. There is no warranty or liability if procedures recommended here have an adverse affect on any systems. Use them at your own risk. Any trademarks mentioned are the property of their owners, none of whom have certified any information provided here. Opinions expressed here are personal only and do not represent the policy of Winnipeg School Division No. 1 or any other organization anywhere.

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Click here to visit the Information "Super-Cul-De-Sac". This page was updated
2001 June 9

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