OT: fdisk

[Robert]

Greetings

I am in deep with the wife. Her computer went belly up. It was running
XP pro and I had backups going to a second drive. I can no longer access
that drive.

I pulled it and attached it via USB to one of my FreeBSD machines but
it will not mount. It is a 500G hard drive and I get _wild_ results just
looking at it with fdisk. 

 ~> fdisk /dev/da1s1
******* Working on device /dev/da1s1 *******
parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are:
cylinders=60801 heads=255 sectors/track=63 (16065 blks/cyl)

Figures below won't work with BIOS for partitions not in cyl 1
parameters to be used for BIOS calculations are:
cylinders=60801 heads=255 sectors/track=63 (16065 blks/cyl)

Media sector size is 512
Warning: BIOS sector numbering starts with sector 1
Information from DOS bootblock is:
The data for partition 1 is:
sysid 114 (0x72),(unknown)
    start 218129509, size 1701990410 (831050 Meg), flag 63
	beg: cyl 368/ head 111/ sector 45;
	end: cyl 371/ head 101/ sector 51
The data for partition 2 is:
sysid 116 (0x74),(unknown)
    start 729050177, size 543974724 (265612 Meg), flag 73
	beg: cyl 67/ head 115/ sector 32;
	end: cyl 299/ head 114/ sector 44
The data for partition 3 is:
sysid 101 (0x65),(Novell Netware/386 3.xx)
    start 168653938, size 0 (0 Meg), flag 74
	beg: cyl 114/ head 111/ sector 32;
	end: cyl 353/ head 115/ sector 52
The data for partition 4 is:
sysid 0 (0000),(unused)
    start 2692939776, size 51635 (25 Meg), flag 0
	beg: cyl 0/ head 0/ sector 0;
	end: cyl 0/ head 0/ sector 0

I tried to use "dd" and copy data to another spare drive. It appears to
work but then I can no longer mount that drive. Other than taking it to
a data recovery shop does anyone have any idea. 

I haven't told her that her data is lost yet. I may have to wait until
we are drinking a bottle of wine. :-)

Thanks for any suggestions.

Robert