OT: fdisk - Data Recovered

[Robert]

On Mon, 4 Oct 2010 11:42:49 -0700
Robert <traveling08 at cox.net> wrote:

> On Tue, 5 Oct 2010 03:53:09 +1100 (EST)
> Ian Smith <smithi at nimnet.asn.au> wrote:
> 
> Ian
> 
> I am in the process of dd the entire disk to a 1TB disk but I wanted
> to respond to you. You have given a lot of good advice and
> information and I appreciate it.
> 

To all who responded to my ntfs fiasco, not only do I thank you but the
wife passes along her thanks and makes the point that she didn't need a
second bottle of wine. :-)

The above dd operation finished late last night but I didn't start
working on until this morning.

Using FreeBSD it acted exactly as the other dd attempts did, i.e. I
could mount_ntfs /dev/ad6 and see the same as I did before but ad6s1
failed to mount as ntfs. ad6s1 would mount with no fs specified but
nothing was readable.

I rebooted into Windows XP and to my surprise the computer restarted
right after the desktop rendered. I then booted into safe mode with
command prompt. This booted successfully and then I changed drives
until I found the data I was looking for. The 1tb drive, now showing as
500GB, appeared as drive G:

I ran chkdsk against g: and after finding and clearing several errors
it quit without completing. I tried to boot normal and the computer
rebooted after the desktop rendered again. I then booted into safe mode
and it came up and ran OK. 

I was able to open the drive and see the data I needed. I inserted a
thumb drive and copied the data over. 

I'm her hero again and we will have the second bottle tonight. :-)

Thanks again to everyone for all the great help.

Robert