Help please guys - Windows 2003 server partition gone

LandyMan

LandyMan

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Hi all,

We are sitting with a bit of a crisis on a server (with about 15 client VMs on :eek:)

When booting into the repair console, diskpart shows that the C: partition is unknown, and 100% free ... is there any way to recover from this?

Thanks
 
Uncle Landy ;)

I can think of mentioning recovery software, but I'm not sure whether it will do the trick for you.

What happened to it? Virus/Malware or is it a physical disk failure?
 
Try Ultimate Recovery or Hirens Boot CD ... I had somehow deleted my primary partition on XP during a raid setup, and used Hirens Boot .... recovery took under 2 minutes, back to normal :)
 
teraside said:
Uncle Landy ;)

I can think of mentioning recovery software, but I'm not sure whether it will do the trick for you.

What happened to it? Virus/Malware or is it a physical disk failure?
Click to expand...

No idea what happened .. two Dell servers, exactly the same problem: Starts up, and when it gets to the Windows Boot screen, it just reboots. Got the one sorted (fixboot) but the second (more important) one has a missing C: partition :(

xeo57 said:
Try Ultimate Recovery or Hirens Boot CD ... I had somehow deleted my primary partition on XP during a raid setup, and used Hirens Boot .... recovery took under 2 minutes, back to normal :)
Click to expand...

Busy downloading ultimate Boot CD ... will check out the other two as well, thanks!
 
Are these RAID partitions? I had a Dell RAID card do this to me some years ago. Replaced the RAID card and booted first time.
 
I had a similar issue. Sounds like your partition table is corrupted.
 
Hard Drive failure ... ouch. We loose an average of one every 6 months between our 10 servers.

I would be very cautious of using BartPE (Ultimate Disk). Build it with Server2003 and not XP !!!! That disk saved so many PCs in my techie days.
 
@ Landyman - once the server is back in play, download clonezilla and make a backup image of the server's critical disks. This image can be created over the network on another windows PC.

I will test Clonezilla on a server with a SCSI RAID and see if it will be able to back it up, and post my experience here, so you will know whether it will work or not.

Contact by PM if you need more details.

Regards

Libs
 
MadMailMan said:
Are these RAID partitions? I had a Dell RAID card do this to me some years ago. Replaced the RAID card and booted first time.
Click to expand...

Hardware diagnostics indicate all HW 100% operational.

froot said:
I had a similar issue. Sounds like your partition table is corrupted.
Click to expand...

Yes it is definitely corrupted, now to "un-corrupt" it :)

The_Librarian said:
@ Landyman - once the server is back in play, download clonezilla and make a backup image of the server's critical disks. This image can be created over the network on another windows PC.

I will test Clonezilla on a server with a SCSI RAID and see if it will be able to back it up, and post my experience here, so you will know whether it will work or not.

Contact by PM if you need more details.

Regards

Libs
Click to expand...

Will keep it in mind, thanks Libs
 
Clonezilla worked a charm ... managed to fix the NTFS partition table, and copy all data to another drive for a server rebuild.

Thanks for the tips guys!
 
LandyMan said:
Clonezilla worked a charm ... managed to fix the NTFS partition table, and copy all data to another drive for a server rebuild.

Thanks for the tips guys!
Click to expand...

:D:D:D:D

Good to hear that it worked.

Only with Clonezilla?

Nothing like making a sysadmin rapidly download some brownware when this sort of thing happens...
 
Last edited:
The_Librarian said:
Only with Clonezilla?

Nothing like making a sysadmin rapidly download some brownware when this sort of thing happens...
Click to expand...

I guess I could have done it with a couple of different options, but what I like about Clonezilla is the ability to go straight into Linux command line (which was what DELL themselves suggested), and I can still remember the linux commands to be able to help myself :)

Pity our sysadmin had to come to me to sort it out ... they had no idea :eek:
 
If I had known that a bug in the HP recovery partition system had deleted my partition table I wouldn't have lost a bunch (or rather around 120GB) of critical data.
 
The_Librarian said:
EINA!!! :(

That's why there's a thing called backup... :p :D
Click to expand...

I thought that was for sissies? :D
This was a while ago. After that I did more regular backups.
But please don't tell me you do a backup at least every seven days?
 
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