MrTsquare wrote:


Maybe I have been misleading you by saying
Macrium couldn't see the disc. As I said in my
first post, Macrium apparently will not select
disc2 apparently cause it cannot see a file
system on disc2. The others show NTFS, but
disc2 shows "file system empty". Kindof a black
hole disc. That's why I tried replacing
Macrium, thinking that it had been corrupted by
the power glitch.
T2

So your thinking then, is that the file
system on that disk got corrupted ?

On a Process Monitor trace, I can see Macrium making
low level disk accesses and "reading" the MBR area first,
followed by "stepping along" the disk and reading file
system info. It does not give the impression that it
"trusts" the operating system.

If there is a "row" on the screen for the disk, but
no file systems shown, then we know it isn't using the
Registry "exclusion of one disk from display" feature.
As that would not have shown a disk 2 row at all.

So what is it reading that has convinced it no
file system is present ? Seems weird that the OS
Disk Management is happy, and Macrium is not.

*******

When "funny things" happen on disks, I'm hesitant to
run CHKDSK right away. That constitutes "repair in place".
And there have been cases, where CHKDSK has made a royal mess.
I would want a "safety" backup, that leads to no further
damage to the disk content, and you make such a backup
with a utility like "dd" (disk dump). Disk dump can
copy every sector and store it in a .img file which
has a size as large as the disk. If I uses "dd"
on a 500GB drive here, the output file would be
exactly 500GB in size, and then I need a larger
disk to hold the .img for safe keeping. The reason
for making such a "copy", is in case my repair attempts
go horribly wrong.

The worst situation I've heard of for CHKDSK, is where
an IDE ribbon cable isn't fully seated. All the info
read from the disk is corrupt. A user selects CHKDSK,
it reads hundreds of thousands of corrupt things, then
writes out sheer rubbish in an attempt to repair it.
And all this happens because the connector was loose.
When CHKDSK is finished, the information content is
then a "write off". Total destruction. CHKDSK doesn't
have the common sense to stop and say "I'm not making
a lot of sense out of this disk" - it just paves
over it like there is no tomorrow. And this is why,
if you value the data, you will find a *second* way
to do a backup, using a method which does not
parse any file systems. And Disk Dump is that method
(it's an acquired taste - some learning required...).

http://www.chrysocome.net/dd

http://www.chrysocome.net/downloads/dd-0.6beta3.zip

You could also use a trial version of something like
this, and see what it thinks of "disk 2".

https://www.r-studio.com/

Paul