Hello

I have 2 striped drives running xp. I have a problem system file on startup.
\windows\system32\config\system.

This tells me that the disks are ok and readable. I thought hey xp may be dead but I should be able to get my data off.

But recovery console wont read the disk. I get a C: prompt but dir gives the error message "an error occurred during directory enumeration". Googling that sent me to this site. Reading other forums seem to suggest the drive is unreadable. But if so why is it still half booting?

My second idea was to load a new xp onto a different hdd and hope it could read my striped drives.
This gives even stranger info. File explorer sees has a second drive letter but will not read it. Error "The file or Directory is corrupted and unreadable".
Disk Management sees the striped drives as healthy, active, 100% free and no file system, suggesting it just needs a format.

But if the disks have no file system why will they start to boot?

I think the answer will be no but is there anyway to recover my data?

Yours in hope

Matt

There are programs which can make an attempt at recovering lost data. You could try looking somewhere like download.com. It all depends upon how badly your file system has been trashed I guess.

Sussed it. God bless Mr Knopper and the wonderful Knoppix. The latest version performed a dirty mount and I got all the data off.
I'm a happy gent and have learnt lots of Linux too, something I've been meaning to do for some time now.
Every cloud has a silver lining.
But isnt it amazing that XP couldnt read the disk but a piece of free software could. Had my first Vista experience today.
I'm a convert. No more Bill Gates sub standard shoddiness for me.

Windows file systems have a lot of problems. Even w/ NTFS, you still have the Registry to contend with, which can be easily corrupted. One of the problems w/ Windows is that it doesn't have journaling like many of the *nix FS.

Journaling keeps meta-data about your data, so the FS always knows exactly what is going on with your data. If your system locks up and you reboot, a journaled FS doesn't have to run Scandisk to see if the drive is corrupted. The journal is looked at and if it doesn't match what the drive says, then the drive data is overwritten w/ the info from the journal. Hence, a reboot is always faster after a lockup or crash.

Even Macs have a journaled FS. I'm not aware of any journaling for Windows by default. Of course, I haven't really used Windows (except at work) for nearly 4 years now so I don't keep up on it like I used to.

__________________
Common Sense v2.0-Striving to make the world a little bit smarter.

Quote:
"NTFS is a journaling file system. It writes a log of changes being made to the files on disk. This offers significant benefits in cases where a system is susceptible to power loss, experiences an unexpected reboot, or a crash. NTFS can quickly return a disk to a consistent state without running CHKDSK, whereas FAT32 always requires CHKDSK to be run effect recovery if a failure occurs."


Ext2 isn't of course.

FWIW, Wikipedia has a comparison of file systems.

__________________
Common Sense v2.0-Striving to make the world a little bit smarter.

In that case somebody should inform Wikpaedia of the error of their ways, because NTFS is definitely a journalled file system.

If you look closely, it does state that NTFS has meta-data only journaling; it doesn't have block-level journaling.

__________________
Common Sense v2.0-Striving to make the world a little bit smarter.

You can try Stellar Phoenix Windows Data recovery software. A good tool to recover lost data due accidental format, or data lost due to software malfunction, viruses or file/directory deletion. It also provides partition recovery from FAT 16, FAT 32, NTFS & NTFS5 file system.
To try the software download the demo from: www.stellarinfo.com
Demo gives the fairer idea about the software before purchase.

Hey Matt

Based on my research in the Microsoft VKB Database

PROBLEM
========
stop 0x0000007b at boot
Recovery Console went right to a C: prompt and when we tried to examine the OS
files we
got the error: “An error occurred during directory enumeration”

CAUSE
======
Disk corruption/hardware failure