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Hi gurus. I have an IDE disk; 120GB, partitioned into two logical volumes; one hosting a WinXP system volume and the other, a data volume. I ripped this disk out of an old laptop after it became corrupted and i believe I've exhausted all options for data recovery. I USB to IDE link the disk as a slave in a physical Win 7 host and get "these drives need formatting before you can access them.. Would you like to format them now?" message (which I obviously chose 'No' to..) In one last ditch attempt at recovery, I heard if i hooked the corrupted drive up as a slave in Suse Linux for example, there MAY be a chance I could see the data on this disk. Well I have been trying to do this in VirtualBox but cannot see any folders on the corrupted disk with which to mount into the Suse VM as a VirtualBox Shared Folder.. I assume i would therefore need to instead mount the whole corrupted volume itself. And I've not had much luck in doing this, hence this post, i.e. Is there a specific way to see a WinXP drive as a slave volume from within a Suse Linux Guest VM in VirtualBox? Thanks for any advice.

I can only offer one tip: image the USB caddy drive using a full sector by sector image (e.g. Linux dd), then do your work on clones of this image - set the physical drive aside, since every time you plug it in you risk corrupting it further. The clones too would need to be full sector by sector images since you can't trust the clone tool to decide which sectors are are in use and which aren't. This is called a raw image - a VMDK descriptor can be created for this which will make it easier to mount in a VM.

Apart from that: I can't offer much advice on recovering the data since there are too many possible forms of corruption. You will want a sector viewer. You'll want to establish whether the MBR/partition map is intact, try to work out where the partitions might be on the disk. If it's just the MBR then a simple "fixmbr" might work. Or you may be able to fill in the partition map using educated guesswork and a hex editor.

You might also find it useful to create a new XP VM and explore the disk of that, get familiar with what should be there, i.e. MBR, boot sector, MFT etc.

Thanks a lot for your valued advice mpack. I will give this a go.