Getting data from a drive with Go Back

I have a 13 month old Gateway here (just out of warranty) with a toasted
motherboard. It has a 320Gb SATA hard drive. The guy wants me to retrieve
some of his important documents from it. So I installed it in one of my own
computers with Windows Pro SP2. BIOS recognizes it. Device Manager lists
it. Disk Management shows it as active, but no drive letter and the option
to assign it one is greyed out.

I thought about cloning it to an IDE drive and when I booted up with
Acronis True Image, it is listed as unsupported. It does show, though, a
small partiton with Go Back on it. And of course that's the culprit.

I've run into this before when trying to clone drives, but in those cases I
was still able to boot the original drive and remove GoBack. This time I
can't because the machine it came out of is non-functioning. Partition
Magic doesn't even see the GoBack partition.

Any suggestions as to how I might be able to read that drive and copy some
of the data off of it?

--
--- A dyslexic man walks into a bra ---

Lil' Abner wrote:
> I have a 13 month old Gateway here (just out of warranty) with a toasted
> motherboard. It has a 320Gb SATA hard drive. The guy wants me to retrieve
> some of his important documents from it. So I installed it in one of my own
> computers with Windows Pro SP2. BIOS recognizes it. Device Manager lists
> it. Disk Management shows it as active, but no drive letter and the option
> to assign it one is greyed out.
>
> I thought about cloning it to an IDE drive and when I booted up with
> Acronis True Image, it is listed as unsupported. It does show, though, a
> small partiton with Go Back on it. And of course that's the culprit.
>
> I've run into this before when trying to clone drives, but in those cases I
> was still able to boot the original drive and remove GoBack. This time I
> can't because the machine it came out of is non-functioning. Partition
> Magic doesn't even see the GoBack partition.
>
> Any suggestions as to how I might be able to read that drive and copy some
> of the data off of it?
>

No idea, but I found one reference here. The question is, when are you
supposed to "press space bar" ?

http://www.dennisjudd.com/2005/02/ro...the_devil.html

Paul

"Lil' Abner" <blvstk@dogpatch.com> wrote in message
news:Xns988A11AD5174Cbutter@wefb973cbe498...
> I have a 13 month old Gateway here (just out of warranty) with a toasted
> motherboard. It has a 320Gb SATA hard drive. The guy wants me to retrieve
> some of his important documents from it. So I installed it in one of my
own
> computers with Windows Pro SP2. BIOS recognizes it. Device Manager lists
> it. Disk Management shows it as active, but no drive letter and the option
> to assign it one is greyed out.
>
> I thought about cloning it to an IDE drive and when I booted up with
> Acronis True Image, it is listed as unsupported. It does show, though, a
> small partiton with Go Back on it. And of course that's the culprit.
>
> I've run into this before when trying to clone drives, but in those cases
I
> was still able to boot the original drive and remove GoBack. This time I
> can't because the machine it came out of is non-functioning. Partition
> Magic doesn't even see the GoBack partition.


I ran into that once and found that XP "sees" the drive as a Goback
partition and won't assign it a drive letter

*however* a win2k installation just "sees" it as NTFS and allows access to
the drive


Although it *might* be possible to edit the partition table and change the
label from a "goback" partition
to NTFS...it would probably be a lot safe to retrieve the data from a win2k
machine



--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

Lil' Abner wrote:
> I have a 13 month old Gateway here (just out of warranty) with a toasted
> motherboard. It has a 320Gb SATA hard drive. The guy wants me to retrieve
> some of his important documents from it. So I installed it in one of my own
> computers with Windows Pro SP2. BIOS recognizes it. Device Manager lists
> it. Disk Management shows it as active, but no drive letter and the option
> to assign it one is greyed out.
>
> I thought about cloning it to an IDE drive and when I booted up with
> Acronis True Image, it is listed as unsupported. It does show, though, a
> small partiton with Go Back on it. And of course that's the culprit.
>
> I've run into this before when trying to clone drives, but in those cases I
> was still able to boot the original drive and remove GoBack. This time I
> can't because the machine it came out of is non-functioning. Partition
> Magic doesn't even see the GoBack partition.
>
> Any suggestions as to how I might be able to read that drive and copy some
> of the data off of it?

Perhaps there are unseen risks in this, but I have put a GoBack volume
into another machine and have allowed it to boot. Hit the spacebar when
the GoBack screen shows up, and you can uninstall it from there. Stop
it after it's done, and slave it to your "regular" boot drive.

philo wrote:
>
> "Lil' Abner" <blvstk@dogpatch.com> wrote in message
> news:Xns988A11AD5174Cbutter@wefb973cbe498...
> > I have a 13 month old Gateway here (just out of warranty) with a toasted
> > motherboard. It has a 320Gb SATA hard drive. The guy wants me to retrieve
> > some of his important documents from it. So I installed it in one of my
> own
> > computers with Windows Pro SP2. BIOS recognizes it. Device Manager lists
> > it. Disk Management shows it as active, but no drive letter and the option
> > to assign it one is greyed out.
> >
> > I thought about cloning it to an IDE drive and when I booted up with
> > Acronis True Image, it is listed as unsupported. It does show, though, a
> > small partiton with Go Back on it. And of course that's the culprit.
> >
> > I've run into this before when trying to clone drives, but in those cases
> I
> > was still able to boot the original drive and remove GoBack. This time I
> > can't because the machine it came out of is non-functioning. Partition
> > Magic doesn't even see the GoBack partition.
>
> I ran into that once and found that XP "sees" the drive as a Goback
> partition and won't assign it a drive letter
>
> *however* a win2k installation just "sees" it as NTFS and allows access to
> the drive
>
> Although it *might* be possible to edit the partition table and change the
> label from a "goback" partition
> to NTFS...it would probably be a lot safe to retrieve the data from a win2k
> machine

I'd been suspecting the same in regard to XP and it might be easier to use a
Knoppix bootable CD for the recovery process as it will read NTFS natively. Just
have a FAT32 partition available to copy the data to as Knoppix can't write NTFS
unless extra steps are taken and support is installed.

Bob

> I'd been suspecting the same in regard to XP and it might be easier to use
a
> Knoppix bootable CD for the recovery process as it will read NTFS
natively. Just
> have a FAT32 partition available to copy the data to as Knoppix can't
write NTFS
> unless extra steps are taken and support is installed.
>

The suggestion to uninstall GoBack may be a good one though!



--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

Grinder <grinder@no.spam.maam.com> wrote in
news:QOlbh.298588$1i1.92269@attbi_s72:

> Lil' Abner wrote:
>> I have a 13 month old Gateway here (just out of warranty) with a
>> toasted motherboard. It has a 320Gb SATA hard drive. The guy wants me
>> to retrieve some of his important documents from it. So I installed
>> it in one of my own computers with Windows Pro SP2. BIOS recognizes
>> it. Device Manager lists it. Disk Management shows it as active, but
>> no drive letter and the option to assign it one is greyed out.
>>
>> I thought about cloning it to an IDE drive and when I booted up with
>> Acronis True Image, it is listed as unsupported. It does show,
>> though, a small partiton with Go Back on it. And of course that's the
>> culprit.
>>
>> I've run into this before when trying to clone drives, but in those
>> cases I was still able to boot the original drive and remove GoBack.
>> This time I can't because the machine it came out of is
>> non-functioning. Partition Magic doesn't even see the GoBack
>> partition.
>>
>> Any suggestions as to how I might be able to read that drive and copy
>> some of the data off of it?
>
> Perhaps there are unseen risks in this, but I have put a GoBack volume
> into another machine and have allowed it to boot. Hit the spacebar
> when the GoBack screen shows up, and you can uninstall it from there.
> Stop it after it's done, and slave it to your "regular" boot drive.

That's basically where I'm at with this one now. The guy went out and
brought a new computer as near to the same model as he could get and put
the old drive in it. He got as far as GoBack and then it wouldn't go any
further. So I told him to boot again and disable GoBack. Then I told him
to put the new drive (the one that came with the new computer) back in
and install the old one as a secondary and he should be able to read it.
Haven't heard back from him yet.

I appreciate all your guys' comments!

--
--- A dyslexic man walks into a bra ---