I have an XP box with two 160GB PATA HDD's that are formatted with several NTFS partitions. Recently I had to manually force my computer to power off after it hung at the shut down screen. The HDD indicated that there was no drive activity at the time but just as the computer powered off, an error message was reported.

Later when I powered the computer back up, disk access was slow and the 1st HDD which contains the OS reached the boot screen but didn't progress much farther. I was able to boot it up via Safe Mode but that is now no longer the case. I booted up a Linux Live CD and used G-Parted to check the partitions, it reported that some of the partitions on the 1st HDD were now "unallocated" and that the 2nd HDD was completely unallocated.

I ran TestDisk and PhotoRec because both had been quite helpful during past situations with HDD corruption and they didn't find a thing on the 2nd HDD. Since then, I have tried several DR programs including R-Studio and most them will detect the 2nd HDD but none of them are able to see the partitions and the data. Every scan just reports an unallocated partition with no partitions or files located.

Can anyone shed any light on what has happened here and if it is possible to recover the partitions please? I'd really appreciate any pointers you can offer.

Probably there are bad sectors.
Do not continue to insist with all these programs or things may go worse, you should make a clone of these hdd on new drives and only then use programs like R-studio on clones for data recovery.
Did you check SMART status?
I think you will see a lot of reallocated sectors or pending sectors in smart status, you can use MHDD to check it (F8 button in mhdd) and do a pic of the screen to post here.

http://hddguru.com/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/

Download mhdd ISO and write it on a CD to boot computer in DOS

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My firmware database:
https://mega.nz/folder/O01DkBRI

Thanks for the reply and the advice. I checked SMART and everything appeared to be fine. I'll check the status again, just to be on the safe side. I will run MHDD and post the results for evaluation. Thanks again.

Here's a screen shot from MHDD.

Smart status seems good to me.
Did you try to do surface scan in mhdd? (F4 button twice)
If yes, have you seen some bad sectors?

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My firmware database:
https://mega.nz/folder/O01DkBRI

I pressed F4 twice and performed a surface scan. I couldn't see any warnings but here's a screen shot of the results, just in case I've missed something.

Any encryption of any kind used?

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

No, none has ever been used in the history of the computer.

Whatever software you ran, R-Studio and such, did the scanning process complete? And there were no issues during the scanning process?

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Could we see the contents of sector 0 in hexadecimal mode?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

I ran most of the DR programs right to the very end and none of them reported anything untoward (in terms of read errors) during the scans.

Can you instruct me on how to display sector 0 in hex mode? I've read the user guide for MHDD but I'm still finding my around.

You could use MHDD's TOF command to read sectors to a file.

Alternatively, if you can work in Windows, then HxD and DMDE are two freeware disc editors.

Still another way would be to capture the partition table and boot sector with Microsoft's Sector Inspector:
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/SecInspect.zip

If you extract the above archive to the one folder and execute the SIrun.bat file, then this will generate a report file named SIout.txt.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Thanks for that. I've attached a report from Sector Inspector and in order to avoid any confusion, I've removed the reports relating to other drives that are not relevant to this issue.

Sector 0 has no MBR code and no partition table. However it does have a unique disk signature (8a a9 8a a9) and the "55 aa" bytes that validate the sector. This explains why the drive is being reported as totally unallocated.

The next thing to do is to examine sectors 63 and 2048. These are the typical locations for the boot sector of the first partition in XP and post-XP Windows versions. You could use HxD or DMDE for this purpose.

If these sectors are empty, then scroll down through the drive. Hopefully you will find some non-zero sectors.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.