Hi!
Thanks for all the suggestions. After more looking around, I found on
the web DFSEE, which was later suggested here, even with the author,
Jan, among us! Thanks. Jan, using your utility, I did manage to
restore it, finally! I did a search for all lost partitions, found the
info in the log and recreated it using create partition. It seems
somehow the disk was strangely partitioned right from the start, and
the issue of my BIOS only recognizing half of the 80GiB drive didn't
certainly help ;-( The CHS information was not correct for the
partition (only by few cylinders), so probably the system did write to the end of
partition,
wrapping around to the start overwriting part of the system area. Or
at least that's what I think happened. So I remade it all with more adequate
values, until I can get a computer with more modern BIOS to overcome
the 32GiB BIOS barrier. I wouldn't trust a DDO for utilising the whole
disk size, which would make any recovery even more difficult. Or at
least find a more modern bios image to flash it with. Support for
older computers is not much good :-(
Jan, thanks for the suggestions and the offer. I would very much like
to buy your utility. Putting out an evaluation version which is
actually working is quite commendable and brave :) But I now don't
have exactly the right bank balance. Humbly, for your offered help and
my appreciation of your program, I can at least send you a big
archival B&W print from my portfolio, if you'd like. Contact me
offlist please.
Big thanks to all! Now I am up and running again. All the files were
still there. Ideally, I should set up some one-way storage for files I
have not yet archived, like a networked computer with big drive and
only "create file" + "read file" permissions, or something like that. I would be wary
of anything in only one computer, as an OS/power crash could still destroy
the data directly... And I will speed up the backing up to CDs.
Good light!
fra
