I had a 40gig drive as my C: system drive . I decided to replace that drive with a 160gig drive. I used Acronis TrueImage to clone the original to the new drive. Everything was working perfectly with the newer larger drive except Norton Anti-virus decided it wasn't activated anymore? No big deal I could re-activate Norton.
Now onto the problem:
One day, about two weeks after inserting the new drive, I was using the computer (not doing anything unusual) and got various messages about various files (each being on my C: drive) being "corrupt and unreadable". I hoped Windows was just temporarily confused so I decided to reboot. After shutting down, I wasn't able to get Windows to reboot.
No errors are displayed at all, it just sort of stops during the boot process. The last thing diplayed on the screen is a message about "Verifying DPMI POOL....." and things just don't progress beyond that so I never even get to the Windows logo. FYI - the BIOS still autodetects the drive properly.
I hooked the problematic drive up to a different system via an external USB enclosure. The drive shows up fine and explorer displays all the files and folders in the root directory fine. However trying to open any file or folder results in the "file is corrupt and unreadable error".
Ideally it'd be nice to get the drive working properly as my primary system drive again but I don't consider that aspect all that important. By far my primary concern is to recover the 40 to 50 gigabytes copied to it during the two weeks after it was intstalled. Much of that data was copied from another drive in the system via cut and paste in Explorer. I assume I could potentially recover a small portion of that data from the originating drive with undelete tools but some of that space would have alreadey been written over.
I'm afraid of randomly trying some revover utility and permanently losing any chance of recovery. Even if the solution is something simple, I'd like to hear about people's experience with various data recovery tools for future reference.
Any help would be appreciated.
Potentially relevent info:
Operating System: Windows XP Pro SP1.
Drives: Western Digital 7200 RPM PATA.
System drive is/was FAT32 format.
I have numerous other drives in the same system, most of which are NTFS format.
I have the original 40 gig drive and have been able to plug it back in to get the system running normally.
Now onto the problem:
One day, about two weeks after inserting the new drive, I was using the computer (not doing anything unusual) and got various messages about various files (each being on my C: drive) being "corrupt and unreadable". I hoped Windows was just temporarily confused so I decided to reboot. After shutting down, I wasn't able to get Windows to reboot.
No errors are displayed at all, it just sort of stops during the boot process. The last thing diplayed on the screen is a message about "Verifying DPMI POOL....." and things just don't progress beyond that so I never even get to the Windows logo. FYI - the BIOS still autodetects the drive properly.
I hooked the problematic drive up to a different system via an external USB enclosure. The drive shows up fine and explorer displays all the files and folders in the root directory fine. However trying to open any file or folder results in the "file is corrupt and unreadable error".
Ideally it'd be nice to get the drive working properly as my primary system drive again but I don't consider that aspect all that important. By far my primary concern is to recover the 40 to 50 gigabytes copied to it during the two weeks after it was intstalled. Much of that data was copied from another drive in the system via cut and paste in Explorer. I assume I could potentially recover a small portion of that data from the originating drive with undelete tools but some of that space would have alreadey been written over.
I'm afraid of randomly trying some revover utility and permanently losing any chance of recovery. Even if the solution is something simple, I'd like to hear about people's experience with various data recovery tools for future reference.
Any help would be appreciated.
Potentially relevent info:
Operating System: Windows XP Pro SP1.
Drives: Western Digital 7200 RPM PATA.
System drive is/was FAT32 format.
I have numerous other drives in the same system, most of which are NTFS format.
I have the original 40 gig drive and have been able to plug it back in to get the system running normally.