I would make a boot diskette with Win98se.exe from http://www.bootdisk.com, then add DELPART.EXE to it.
I'd boot that and delpart the partitions on the drive that is messed up. Then I'd boot XP and use its DISK MANAGEMENT tool to create the partition and format it on the drive.
Best of luck on what path you want to try.
Bob
I had posted the following on DYI Data Recovery...
I have two disks on my system, (Intel III, 996 MHZ 512 mb of RAM). I have a removable drive for the boot 'C' drive. Recently downloaded Solaris 10, and installed on a different removable hard drive.
Spent some time playing with the Solaris drive in, trying to get Solaris to recognize my NIC card, trying things like 'ifconfig -dv", finally ordered and am waiting for a different NIC card.
Put windows XP back in. When I try to acess the 'D' drive, I get an "the drive is not formatted" error message. I did a Web search, and other postings asked the posting person if they had taken that drive to a different operating system, (they had XP, and took it to a 2000 system, etc.). This makes me think that somehow, either during the Solaris installation, or when using the ifconfig, etc. utilities, that somehow I corrupted the 'D' drive'
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I then downloaded their DiskPatch 2.1 demo and scanned the disks, and sent the resulting logs to them, they replied back with...
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I'm assuming this is about disk 129, since disk 128 seems to be okay, as far as DiskPatch is concerned.
As you can see in the following list :
### PARTLIST.ARRAY.INTERPRETED ###
SEQ_|____TYPE_|______START_|_____LENGTH_|________END_|__PL_|___R
001 | ..FAT16 | ........63 | ...4192902 | ...4192964 | PRI | .1-
002 | ...NTFS | ........63 | .156296322 | .156296384 | PRI | .4+
003 | ...NTFS | ..99506662 | ...8385867 | .107892528 | PRI | .2+
there is only 1 partition that appears to be a likely candidate; the NTFS that spans almost the entire disk. What can you tell us about the original layout of the problem disk? What partitions where there, what sizes?
If the layout was 1 big NTFS it's strange to see this got messed up like it did. DiskPatch should be able to restore things to normal as far as the damaged NTFS partition goes, but that doesn't guarantee that the rest of that partition (the MFT for instance) is undamaged.
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I sent a few questions back and they replied with...
"I assume that SEQ 3, is the NFTS partion that you are talking about. What are SEQ 1, and 2?"
Currently there's a FAT16 partition defined where you'd expect the NTFS partition.
You'd need to select
002 | ...NTFS | ........63 | .156296322 | .156296384 | PRI | .4+
to recover the NTFS partition. Recovery will be done based on a backup boot sector that belongs to an NTFS partition that starts at the start of the disk and spans aboout the entire disk. Currently this partition isn't there because it has no partition table entry and the boot sector is missing.
"How to determine if the MFT is damaged or not?"
In general, if you select the partition in the partition list > Enter > Enter, and DiskPatch is able to show the volume label name, the MFT is intact (to be able to retrieve the label name DiskPatch has to locate the MFT and interpret the MFT $Volume entry. Note that this is just a fair indication and not a guarantee.
"Before Iwe do anything to the 129 drive, should I somehow try to back it upclone it...but how to do this?"
There's no real need if you use DiskPatch, repairs made can be undone.
DiskPatch can clone a disk (disk to disk) if you use the Pro or higer version.
"If you think that you product will do the job, what will it cost me"
Pricing info is available on the website, see http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/shop.htm
"is this something that you will give me walk through instruction on exactly what to do?"
There's nothing to walk you through really, but we we're here yes. We more or less expect you to read the user guide (just the relevant sections - basically all questions asked so far are in fact answered in the user guide). And basically all you need to do is select the partition that you want to recover (seq. no. 2).
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It is not that I doubt or distrust them, it is just that this is all new to me. Does everyone agree that diskPatch is the way for me to go here? does anyone have any knowledge of Solaris affecting a hard drive this way?
thanks
Lou

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