OS Selector killed my partition. I'm shocked.

Hello everyone.

This is one of those days I've lost a couple of weeks of my life.
First of all, I want to ask you, don't pay too much attention on my english, I'm from Russia and rather young.

To start with, I'll make a brief story.
For the last more than year a had two operation systems installed on my pc, it's WinXP and KUbuntu Linux (that doesn't matter much) and I also had GRUB, which has been functioned as a boot loader allowing me to boot both of these systems. Once upon, a friend of mine adviced me to take a brief look on Acronis OS Selector, saying he's not yet tested that (he has LILO), but wants me to mark it and to know my opinion on it. I had no reasons to refuse, so agreed and installed that... Just installed, without even a sense to use it in the future, but to test and find out what it is actually. You're all know how this happens. So I did that, I installed OS Selector. My experience in using PC started with rapid evanescence of green screens epoch and appearance of new DOS-based systems and sooner, mysterious giantic Win95. Now I'm both nix and win user, so the only reason I tell you about it is that I'm mostly confident in the things I do, so I try to undertake the situation. But that's not the case.

Well, let's go on with the milestone where I said I installed OS Selector. Yes, I really did that (I cancelled to create rescue disks but that should be neverminded). I rebooted. On the next boot OS Selector was performing some actions I couldn't influence on. Then a afk'ed... When I came back (it was deep night(morning) there, about 4-5 a.m.) I got my PC hanged up. But I wanted to sleep, so I fell. When I got up today, I turned on the power and loaded WinXP. The next brutal step was to launch audio player, which mystically refused to get laucnhed, so I was like "wtf?!". I pressed win+e in order to see what's gone on, and that's just what I've seen:

http://www.tranceparent.gorodok.net/datacenter.PNG

My 130Gb became no longer available. And currently I don't even know what to do with it and how to get it recovered to previous state. PartitionMagic as well as everything else tells it's RAW(unformatted), so it's unable to check it for errors... unable to do anything... And I'm SHOCKED and confused about it.
As for the data... It contains files which I have for about 5 years and sometimes more (programming sources, my engine, tons of trance music and a lot a lot more)...

But One thing I know... I will NEVER use OS Selector and I'll put in stone that it's one of the never-to-be-used (I'll restrain from saying "mustdie") software I ever seen. My opinion and my advices about it are both hardly concerned with the fact to avoid using it. I understand you, Acronis developers, because I'm developer by myself. But understand me, the end user, who found himself in trouble by using your software.

Faithfully. Exhaustedly.
Hexfire.

 

Hexfire,

Precisely what is your system state at this time? You've provided a screenshot which basically tells us nothing aside from something that may have experinced some level of corruption.

What are the available physical devices on your system? On these devices, what partitions are listed?

You can obviously boot to WinXP. Things might not be as bad as they seem (google is your friend...), unless of course you've started to actively rebuild without fully assessing the situation. Since you are an experienced WIN and Unix user, I assume you have not gone this route.

Blue

 

Well... You're partially right. System is alive. I'm currently able to boot to win, as well as to linux. But previously I had to recover GRUB, because OS Selector managed to modify MBR (I dunno exactly the principle it works by, you know that way better), so it, or probably something else, prevented me from showing even GRUB. As soon as it was recovered, I managed to boot to Win. And by that moment I didn't know that there's something wrong with my data partition. In order to figure out the situation a bit better, I'll make a map:
(hda. Primary Master. Boot from here.)
"C:" — Primary. System partition. Active. 20Gb sized. WinXP. NTFS.
"D:" — Primary. Data partition, 130Gb sized. No OS installed. NTFS

(hdb. Primary Slave. None)
"/" — Primary. Ext3, ~20Gb. Grub program is here.
...swap & other partitions...

There's a kind of chain. First drive launches GRUB link and points to second drive, where it's conf files are placed. Since I got GRUB recovered, I've also got the oppurtunity to boot to both OSes. It's obviously that OS Selector was trying to modify D: partition (e.g. move, resize, etc..), but something has gone wrong so it hanged up.

Screenshot only tells that one of the partitions became no longer accessible. Because it's really so. And yes, it doesn't actually mean that data is now corrupted, but doesn't mean the opposite, as well. Right? I had a lot of similar situations, but they were mostly been solved just by using low-level disk editors, which could repair filetable and fix bad sectors including mbr fail consequences, according to existing data (e.g. NDD and other utils), but it didn't work this time. I'm working on it at the moment and looking for other possible solutions, because to lose that data fore me would be nightmare.

Hexfire

 

Hexfire,

I guess I'm a little hazy on what you expected. The Acronis DD FAQ should be consulted, as should the general documentation prior to an install. Yes, the MBR is modified, which should be expected based on the product function.

Although I use DD for many tasks, I do not use and have not installed the OS selector module on my multi-OS machine, I use GRUB as well (I prefer it).

At this point, your data may or may not be corrupted - just keep in mind that it is important to "do no harm" at this stage, so work cautiously. This is a task to be done live. I assume that you have Acronis DD already installed, I'd probably attempt recovery through that initially.

Blue

 

Don't be, you're not the only one.

I recently purchased Disk Director 10 (within the past 10 days).
What I have since discovered is that DD10 will delete all partitions
on all my hard drives not plugged into the motherboard controller
somewhere during the shutdown/bootup phase. This is 100%
repeatable.

Setup:
Motherboard: Gigabyte 7VT600P-RZ
Processor: AMD Athlon 2100+
Addon IDE Controller: Adaptec ATA RAID 1200A

Disk 0: Above Controller, 232 GB, One Primary Partition, NTFS
Disk 1: Above Controller, 189 GB, One Primary Partition, NTFS
Disk 2: MOBO Primary Controller, 153 GB
Disk 3: MOBO Primary Controller, 149 GB
Disk 4: Western Digitial MyBook Essentials 320 GB

OS: Windows 2000 Pro SP4

It's a real thrill to reboot your system and discover 700 GB
of space has disappeared. And if you think DD10 does recovery,
well, you CAN dream...keep doing so.

I use a product called Zero Assumption Recovery 8.0 which does
a reasonably good job of recovering data off of a hard drive.
It does not change the disk you are recovering from, you
have to have another drive to save the data to.
It's why I bought the above MyBook ($144 at Sams Club).
So to recover 300 GB of data only to have it disappear !again!
is really infuriating.

One really unhappy customer.