No Drive Letter

[AzWiz]

I have a problem on one partition of a drive. In checking storage management:

The first primary partition is fine. The second one (also primary) shows "healthy (unknown partition)". How do I get Recuvva to scan a partition w/o a drive letter? XP will not let you assign a drive letter to an "unknown partition.

 

Any help really appreciated.

[Nergal]

Recuva requires a drive letter in order to scan. . . sorry we can't help past that it's just a fact for the program.

[DennisD]

I wonder if this might help you ...

 

What does "Healthy (Unknown Partition)" mean?

 

"Healthy (Unknown Partition)" is the way hidden partitions typically show up in XP's Disk Management console. Although XP can "see" the partition, it will not assign it a drive letter and cannot access files on the hidden partition.

On occasion, a data partition may accidentally have its partition-type code toggled to "hidden" and any data on it may appear to be lost. To recover, simply toggle the partition-type back to its proper code. There are a number of third-party utilities that can easily do this, such as PartitionMagic, BootIt-NG, Partition Commander, Ranish Partition Manager, et al. If you don't have something like that, the easiest way may be to download the free utility ptedit.zip. Extract ptedit.exe from within the zipfile, boot from a DOS floppy (or Win98 startup floppy, or see www.bootdisk.com if you don't have one), run ptedit.exe, and change the appropriate partition-type from hidden-NTFS (or hidden-FAT32) to normal NTFS (or FAT32). Reboot into XP and see if the partition now shows up as it should.

 

Source: goodells.net

Link:

 

If so, a partition manager like "MiniTool Partition Wizard Home Edition 6.0" (Free Version) should be able to toggle the "hidden" attribute.

 

"EASEUS Partition Master 8.0.1 Home Edition" (Free) will also "Unhide" a partition.

 

It depends how badly you want the stuff from your partition, but it's worth a try maybe.

 

 

EDIT: Removed a link for Paragon as the free version doesn't do the "Unhide" thing.

Edited June 10, 2011 by DennisD

[Alan_B]

"MiniTool Partition Wizard Home Edition 6.0" also has a built in "Partition Recovery Wizard" in both the Live Windows and the Boot CD versions.

 

A bad thing, a very very bad thing, happened to ALL the partitions on my Laptop.

Total doorstop.

The MiniTool Boot CD identified many boundaries where I had placed and resized partitions,

and I received adequate clues to identify which were the latest boundaries,

and then it resurrected them with all their data.

 

I learnt from that experience that "Primary" is a USELESS label for the system partition,

and now I prefer labels such as "C_System", "D_Data", "H_Portable",

because all Boot CD's can read the partition labels,

but cannot see the "Drive Letters" which are an artefact of the Windows system when running.

[redhawk]

TestDisk can fix damaged or missing partition information.

 

Richard S.