It all started last evening when I turned on my PC. I used to have a lot of partitions (Total 9) in my 2 160 GB HDD. Today when I started my PC, it showed me only 6 drives. The other HDD was present and Windows could recognize the HARD DISK. The problem was that although the Disk Management utility was showing the DISK 1 below as OFFLINE.

The screenshot above shows when everything was working fine.

When I saw the DISK 1 offline, I tried to bring it online but it threw an error message. I checked the Event logs and found…

Event Type: Error
Event Source: LDM
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1500
Date: 12/10/2008
Time: 1:27:00 AM
User: N/A
Computer: MSHOME
Description: Disk group RahulsoniDg0: Errors in some configuration copies: Disk Harddisk1, copy 1: Block 0: Invalid magic number in the configuration copy

Event Type: Error
Event Source: LDM
Event Category: None
Event ID: 2
Date: 12/10/2008
Time: 1:27:00 AM
User: N/A
Computer: MSHOME
Description: INTERNAL Error - The disk group contains no valid configuration copies (C10000B6).

My reaction was… “SHITTTTTT”… all my Songs and more importantly all “My Documents” data including my Mails etc was on this HDD. Yes, I did have backup, but the point is… it is not easy to restore 100+ GB of data. At this moment, my heart started sinking… seriously!!!

Searching the Internet got me a few interesting discussions, but none of them were so insightful as to give me enough directions about how to troubleshoot this issue. Mine was a SATA disk, and I knew that it wasn’t the HDD that was at fault, since it was still being detected by the OS. I had to give it a shot… to recover my partitions and data with as little hassle as possible.

I started looking for some tools like R-Studio and although it was able to figure out my files, it didn’t give me any direct option to restore my partitions. I could have used it and may be, I would have been back in business in about 10 hours, but gosh… 10 HOURS (or more)… NOT GOOD!!!

Then, I stumbled over testdisk, and yes it saved me a lot of my precious time. Here is how…

BEFORE I PROCEED, A DISCLAIMER >>> I USED THIS TOOL KNOWING THE FACT THAT IT DOESN’T COME WITH ANY SORT OF WARRANTY AND I KNEW EXACTLY WHAT I WANTED TO DO. IF YOU HAVE ANY CONFUSION, PLEASE CONSULT A PROFESSIONAL. DON’T USE THIS TOOL TO MAKE YOUR PROBLEM WORSE

Start TESTDISK_WIN.EXE from the Install folder

Press UP/DOWN key to select your HDD and hit Enter

Select the Partition table type and hit Enter (I chose Intel)

Select Analyze and hit Enter

   
    In the next screen, select Quick Search and hit Enter, you should see a screen similar to…

 

    NOW, it is the time to setup your partitions… if you hit Enter from here, nothing would happen and you will go to the Next screen. Basically, you will have to set your Primary and Logical partition in this screen. I chose the following (using up/down/left/right arrow keys)

    After you hit Enter, it will ask you to overwrite the existing Partition Table. After this it will ask you to reboot your box. I selected YES since I had no other way.

Let me tell you honestly… while I was rebooting… those couple of minutes were probably one of the hardest for me ever, since I didn’t know how backlogged my corrupt partition table would make me. Thankfully, it worked and here I am… back in business!!!

Hope this helps someone.
Rahul

Quote of the day:
If winning isn't everything, why do they keep score? - Vince Lombardi