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I struggled to describe this, so excuse the ambiguous title. I have an old Western Digital Caviar 120Gb HDD I found out - I suspect it's the contents of an old PC of mine so it's bound to have photos or something I'd want hence I'm being quite careful about what I do to it.

Firstly, it's an IDE drive and I've got a USB -> IDE converter. I don't have anything else to try it with, but I have 15 other drives here which have all worked fine including another of the same type.

The drive would have been mounted with XP and is NTFS.

Firstly, when I plug it into Windows 7 I get an "Invalid Disk" error in Disk Management. I followed the procedure here:

http://www.neondemon.com/archives/how-to-fix-invalid-disk-error-in-windows-7

And got the disc to read. However, the 'data' is garbled. I reset the changes and fired up Ubuntu. The disc mounts fine, but shows the 'data' in exactly the same method. Here is what it looks like:

(NB: All the 'files' show as 216Mb)

Disk1

Disk2

I then ran this utility:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

But it seemed happy enough with the single partition on there.

I'm very iffy about doing much else as there's no way to know if it's a fix until I've written back to the drive. I should do a byte by byte copy, but I don't think I have the space so I was hoping someone could give me a bit of a pointer.

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possible duplicate of NTFS Partition Repair - Recommendations – techie007 Nov 3 '11 at 3:07
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No, it's not a duplicate of that, because this isn't a corrupt volume at all. It was a "dynamic disc" container partition, that could potentially contain anything from portions of multiple spanned volumes to every Nth stripe of a striped volume, that's been turned into an MS Data "basic disc" partition by the questioner manually editing the partition type in the partition table. Of course it won't be readable. The advice on Mike Norman's web-log is very poor advice, because it only "works" for people who don't use any form of striping or spanning at all on their dynamic discs. – JdeBP Nov 3 '11 at 11:07
Interesting point JdeBP - I don't think I used it in RAID, but it's not out of the realms of possibility. – Dan Nov 3 '11 at 11:19
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Corrupt data table for NTFS? This may be your friend. http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

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Perhaps explain why that link will be of use to him (us)? – techie007 Nov 3 '11 at 3:06
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