Software & Computers

The Windows operating systems have emerged greatly from the generation when hard drives were used to be segmented off using a simple fdisk DOS command. Beginning with FAT16 and FAT32 systems complex partitioning was created so as to allow specialized applications to run. This process improved further with the advent of the NTFS file system. Of course as things evolve they become more sophisticated and this often means that they are more prone to problems.
At the time of up gradation to Windows XP from earlier versions of Windows, one might face one or more of the following situations:

After the first reboot of Windows XP Setup, the user might receive any of the following error messages:
Stop: 0x0000007b (0xf898963c, 0xc0000034, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)
Setup has determined that Drive C: is corrupted and cannot be repaired. To quit setup press F3.
Windows could not start because of the following ARC firmware boot configuration problem. Did not properly generate ARC name for HAL and System path. Please check the windows documentation about ARC configuration options and your hardware reference manuals for additional information.
No operating system.

The setup might even halt with a blank black screen after the first reboot.
After the completion of the installation process, the secondary hard disk that worked well with other Windows operating system versions might not work here.
Now after this behavior, the up-gradation process may stop and the user cannot boot the system. The data stored becomes inaccessible and here is the case of data loss.

Reason
One can encounter this situation if he is using the hard drive overlay software for controlling the hard drive. There are few versions of the drive overlay software which might not be compatible with Microsoft Windows XP. So, the up gradation process does not accomplish and the user can face the critical situations of Windows partition loss and thus the data loss.
Solution
1. To avoid such problems, contact the vendor of drive overlay software to
inquire about the solution of such problems.
2. The user should never use fdisk/mbr command from Windows startup disk or
fixmbr command in the Windows XP Recovery Console. Both these commands
would destroy the drive overlay MBR information and it might cause severe
data loss.

To solve this problem, one needs to repartition the hard drive by using XP bootable CD and then reinstall a fresh copy of Windows XP. Formatting will remove all hard drive partitions and their data. Here comes the requirement of Partition Recovery.


Partition Recovery can be done in the best possible way by using an effective third party Partition Recovery software such as Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery. This robust software works well for both FAT and NTFS file systems and carries out efficient and smooth Partition Recovery. Phoenix Partition Recovery software is compatible with most of the Windows versions including Windows 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista.

Garry Thomson a student of Mass Communication doing research on data recovery software. He is also a freelancer for http://www.stellarinfo.com

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - How To Recover Windows Partition Lost Due To Incompatible Drive Overlay Software