davidnagel
Beta member
- Messages
- 5
Howdy, my first post on this forum and its a biggun (for me anyway) hello to everyone, hope you are all well and had a good christmas and new year - I know I did!
Right... shall I start from the beginning?
Awhile ago, I bought two IDE 120gb Maxtor harddrives. I felt it sensible to make them into a RAID. Instead of the usual hardware RAID I like Windows create a RAID 5 arrangement and it stripped the file system across the two drives.
Then one day the second harddrive starting clicking, this was the harddrive that had my second partition on and also all the files I never backed up. I backed up what I could and then it died.
After some intense podding and poking I discovered that the PCB was in fact dead. I left it like this for a long while, continued to use the first drive's operating system till I decided it was best to leave this alone till I got a new PCB. So I continued with another harddrive, blah, blah
It wasn't until recently that I found a nice chap on ebay and he sent me a new PCB and the harddrive boots up fine. No clicking. No smell. No unusual noise.
Now, I started the machine up and noticed that the second harddrive strip thing was registered as Offline in the Disk Management. So I restarted assuming it might have needed to be provoked to work. This obviously didn't work and after some reading on Microsoft.com I discovered that I needed to right-click the Offline Dynamic Disk and click Reactivate.
Fine.
So I started up the computer again but this time the progress bar for Windows was going awfully slow, then it stopped, and reported that the file ISAPNP.SYS was corrupt or missing and suggested I load the Windows Recovery Console from my Windows CD and replace the file (backing up the original first of course)
So I set about doing this but only to discover that for some strange reason, the recovery console gave me the C: drive letter but didn't let me look at anything. So I pulled the operating system disk out and plugged it up in another system to have a look, sure enough, there wasn't anything on it.
I assume that because the partition is in fact a Dynamic Disk/Partition a non-dynamic (Basic) disk cannot look at the file system? With this in mind, I went and found loads of NTFS boot cds and Boot cds to see if I could read the filesystem to replace the file... but nothing. As far as everything else is concerned the disk doesn't exist.
But I know for a fact it exists because why else would it attempt to load an operating system at startup if there wasn't one?
Well, I'm sure you can see my dilemma. Is there anything I can do to replace this SYS file outside the recovery console which can't see the C drive either?
Any help is much appreciated.
If you need more details on the harddrives or software or anything please do not hesitate to ask. I've been waiting nearly a year to get this old data back online and finally backedup so do this silly old sod a favour at give me a few pointers! LOL!
All the best,
David
Right... shall I start from the beginning?
Awhile ago, I bought two IDE 120gb Maxtor harddrives. I felt it sensible to make them into a RAID. Instead of the usual hardware RAID I like Windows create a RAID 5 arrangement and it stripped the file system across the two drives.
Then one day the second harddrive starting clicking, this was the harddrive that had my second partition on and also all the files I never backed up. I backed up what I could and then it died.
After some intense podding and poking I discovered that the PCB was in fact dead. I left it like this for a long while, continued to use the first drive's operating system till I decided it was best to leave this alone till I got a new PCB. So I continued with another harddrive, blah, blah
It wasn't until recently that I found a nice chap on ebay and he sent me a new PCB and the harddrive boots up fine. No clicking. No smell. No unusual noise.
Now, I started the machine up and noticed that the second harddrive strip thing was registered as Offline in the Disk Management. So I restarted assuming it might have needed to be provoked to work. This obviously didn't work and after some reading on Microsoft.com I discovered that I needed to right-click the Offline Dynamic Disk and click Reactivate.
Fine.
So I started up the computer again but this time the progress bar for Windows was going awfully slow, then it stopped, and reported that the file ISAPNP.SYS was corrupt or missing and suggested I load the Windows Recovery Console from my Windows CD and replace the file (backing up the original first of course)
So I set about doing this but only to discover that for some strange reason, the recovery console gave me the C: drive letter but didn't let me look at anything. So I pulled the operating system disk out and plugged it up in another system to have a look, sure enough, there wasn't anything on it.
I assume that because the partition is in fact a Dynamic Disk/Partition a non-dynamic (Basic) disk cannot look at the file system? With this in mind, I went and found loads of NTFS boot cds and Boot cds to see if I could read the filesystem to replace the file... but nothing. As far as everything else is concerned the disk doesn't exist.
But I know for a fact it exists because why else would it attempt to load an operating system at startup if there wasn't one?
Well, I'm sure you can see my dilemma. Is there anything I can do to replace this SYS file outside the recovery console which can't see the C drive either?
Any help is much appreciated.
If you need more details on the harddrives or software or anything please do not hesitate to ask. I've been waiting nearly a year to get this old data back online and finally backedup so do this silly old sod a favour at give me a few pointers! LOL!
All the best,
David