Deleted FAT32 on External Drive

[PHILB]

Can anyone please help.

I made a mistake when I was "Cleaning" my computer and compeltly deleted the FAT32 BOOT Sector of my Lecia External Drive, I mean - DELETED GONE forever as I was using DARUK NUKE file erase forever.

I stopped the erase once I realised, but it had already deleted the FAT32 Boot Sector now whenever I connect the USB Drive my computer does not see it.

I have another backup of my data so i dont mind if I lose the stored data (although I prefer not to). I want to know is there ANY way that I can restore a boot sector so at a minimum I can use the external drive again.

I can see the Drive when I go to Computer Manager - No Drive letter assigned and I have tried to recover from here but no luck.

Thanks PHIL.

[Alexey V. Gubin]

I do not quite understand the current state of the drive. It would be nice if you can get me a screenshot of the disk manager -
Open Disk Management (under Computer manager), press Alt+Printscreen, then paste into whatever graphics application you use (even Paint will do, which is built into Windows). Save the file and attach here.

Basically if you have "no drive letter assigned" AND GOOD BACKUP, you right click the offending drive and pick "Format". This reinitializes filesystem, bye bye data but the drive is back into use.

[desyek]

I have a similar problem.

Disk management on Vista recognises the drive but says it is unreadable/unknown and therefore won't let me format it or anything.

XP's disk management doesn't recognise the drive at all.

In both Vista and XP the drive doesn't show up under 'Computer' but shows up under the Drives section of Device Manager.

The problem arose when there was a problem during creating a partition on this drive and since then it's refused to work - it was working perfectly fine before.

All I want to do is be able to format this drive completely so that I can use it again.

Any advice? Google searching has been less than helpful - with people suggesting that buying a new drive is the best option.

Thanks,

Daf

PS - ZAR 8.3 recognises the drive and is currently doing a volume analysis.

[Alexey V. Gubin]

Open ZAR logfile, which is C:\Program Files\ZAR|logfile.txt
At the start of it, you will see several lines stating "Opening physical drive..." Copy all the data recorded in the log until you see "Starting raw scanner", then post it here so I can see what it is about. This provides basic information about the status of a disk, and also about the partition table or whatever remains of it.

[desyek]

Dear Alexey, below is the Log data from this particular session of use.

I feel I must also comment that I'm glad I found ZAR - I managed to recover over 95% of the images that were on my memory card - some of which must have been over-written as the amount of data recovered was more than the capacity of the card (there were some new images that I'd taken that day and thought I'd test this software on it - a 1GB CF card with useable space of around 947MB produced 1.1GB of data!

Anyhoo, here's the data and thanks in advance.

Daf.

PS, the drive in question is the quantum fireball.

-----------------

Init done - logging
NT 5.1.2600 Service Pack 2; 703 MB RAM
Open physical drive 00000100 success, 38154 MB : IC25N040ATMR04-0 - Port 0, Bus 0, Target 0, LUN 0; maxLBA=78140160
Open physical drive 00000101 success, 0 B : Generic USB SD Reader; maxLBA=0
Open physical drive 00000102 success, 0 B : Generic USB CF Reader; maxLBA=0
Open physical drive 00000103 success, 0 B : Generic USB SM Reader; maxLBA=0
Open physical drive 00000104 success, 0 B : Generic USB MS Reader; maxLBA=0
Open physical drive 00000105 success, 78167 MB : Maxtor 6 Y080L0; maxLBA=160086528
Open physical drive 00000100 success, 38154 MB : IC25N040ATMR04-0 - Port 0, Bus 0, Target 0, LUN 0; maxLBA=78140160
Open physical drive 00000101 success, 0 B : Generic USB SD Reader; maxLBA=0
Open physical drive 00000102 success, 0 B : Generic USB CF Reader; maxLBA=0
Open physical drive 00000103 success, 0 B : Generic USB SM Reader; maxLBA=0
Open physical drive 00000104 success, 0 B : Generic USB MS Reader; maxLBA=0
Open physical drive 00000105 success, 78167 MB : Maxtor 6 Y080L0; maxLBA=160086528
Open physical drive 00000100 success, 38154 MB : IC25N040ATMR04-0 - Port 0, Bus 0, Target 0, LUN 0; maxLBA=78140160
Open physical drive 00000101 success, 0 B : Generic USB SD Reader; maxLBA=0
Open physical drive 00000102 success, 0 B : Generic USB CF Reader; maxLBA=0
Open physical drive 00000103 success, 0 B : Generic USB SM Reader; maxLBA=0
Open physical drive 00000104 success, 0 B : Generic USB MS Reader; maxLBA=0
Open physical drive 00000105 success, 78167 MB : Maxtor 6 Y080L0; maxLBA=160086528
Open physical drive 00000106 success, 28629 MB : QUANTUM FIREBALLP LM30; maxLBA=58633344
Sector 0, row 1 - 63/20531007 @ base 0 - FAT32x
Sector 20531070, row 1 - 63/34282647 @ base 20531070 - FAT32
Sector 20531070, row 2 - 38395350/3807405 @ base 20531070 - Discarded - Volume end out of disk
Sector 20531070, row 3 - 0/0 @ base 20531070 - Empty
Sector 20531070, row 4 - 0/0 @ base 20531070 - Empty
Sector 0, row 2 - 20531070/38090115 @ base 0 - Extended
Sector 0, row 3 - 0/0 @ base 0 - Empty
Sector 0, row 4 - 0/0 @ base 0 - Empty
Ldm: started processing of the device 0100
Ldm: started processing of the device 0105
Ldm: started processing of the device 0106
Processing volume ID 01060000
-------------------------------------
Volume information for ID 01060000
Origin : MBR/Primary
Partition type : FAT32x
Capacity : 10024 MB
Number of sectors : 20531007
RAID type : Simple volume
Stripe size : 1
Rotation parameters: 0 / 0
Member 00 : 20531007 sectors at LBA 63 on device 0106
-------------------------------------
Volume information for ID 01060000
Origin : MBR/Primary
Partition type : FAT32x
Capacity : 10024 MB
Number of sectors : 20531007
RAID type : Simple volume
Stripe size : 1
Rotation parameters: 0 / 0
Member 00 : 20531007 sectors at LBA 63 on device 0106
Starting raw scanner for a total of 20531007 sectors

[Alexey V. Gubin]

Right click "My Computer", select "Manage".
On a left panel, navigate to "Storage" -- "Disk Management". This brings a list of disks on a right side.
It will list "Disk 0", "Disk 1" and so on, along with the sizes. Find the drive sized about 30GB. The drive should be there (because otherwise ZAR does would not see it).
Once you found it, right click it, pick "Properties" and there should be a drive model listed. Verify it reads something like "Fireball LM30", then click OK.
The above steps ensure you have identified the drive properly. Now the volumes from the disk are listed to the right of the "Disk X", along with the filesystem type (if available) and size. For all volumes on that disk, right click the volume, select "Delete partition".Be careful with this.

When done, reboot and you get a blank hard drive; which you repartition as you need.