need to rebuild partition table on external usb drive

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I was trying to help my friend out by fixing his computer /never, ever again
Anyway to get the data off his machine before reinstalling everything I booted up with knoppix live cd (a linux distro that boots from cd, v. useful if you dont screw things up)
and then mounted an external usb drive in linux so that I could copy his files off. I then told him to copy everything over and forgot to tell him to dismount it after.

The state of play now is that it when added (to a vista/xp machine) it recognises a usb mass storage device but doesnt appear in ‘my computer’ – no drive letter. (also I tried remounting in linux but I get the error ‘NTFS is either inconsistent, or you have hardware faults……’)

So I tried going into disk management in administrative tools, and tried to ‘initialise’ and selected MBR. It gives an error message that I will add to this post when I get home.

Any ideas? I think the partition table is corrupted but the data is still fine /crosses fingers

Ed

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I guess you could try chkdsk, but I wouldn’t be very hopeful.

Do you still have the data on the original PC? Can you copy it again?

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unfortunately no. at least there is data that he needs that only exists on the usb drive.

I tried to get that error message back, but I don’t get the option to ‘initialise’ on the drive anymore in disk management.
I just shows one unallocated partition on the drive – this is why i think (hope) its just the partition table that is corrupted. I suppose something like partition magic might be able to rebuild it without deleting the information on the drive? I remember using that program a few years ago and it didn’t go to well…

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Google search shows lots of tools that claim to be able to recover corrupt partitions, but I cannot recommend any of them.

I have had great success recovering deleted files with recuva, but I don’t think this will help if you can’t access the partition.

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