NTRecover description
NTRecover is a program designed to repair drives that are inacessible due to misconfigured or missing software

Finally, the utility that NT system administrators have been waiting for. With NTRecover you can access a dead x86 NT system's disks from a good system over a serial connection. You can then salvage data off of the drives using native NT commands and utilities. With the write-version you can even run chkdsk on the dead system's drives! The read-only version is freeware.

NTRecover is an advanced Windows NT dead-system recovery utility for x86 NT installations. Using NTRecover, NT machines that fail to boot because of data corruption, improperly installed software or hardware, or faulty configuration, can be accessed and recovered using standard administrative tools, as if the machine were up and running. Using an adjacent NT-based computer connected by a serial cable, NTRecover allows an administrator to:

Copy files between the non-booting system and the working NT system.
Edit or delete files that may be preventing the system from booting.
Run virus detection and removal programs.
Repair damaged filesystem structures using chkdsk.
NTRecover consists of host and client software, where the host software runs on a "good" NT 3.51 or 4.0 system, and the client software executes on a "dead" system in need of repair. The "dead" system is booted off a floppy disk directly to the NTRecover program, so repair is possible even when basic startup code in NT, such as NTLDR, fails. The host and client machines are connected with a standard null-modem serial cable.

The NTRecover host software creates virtual disk drives on the host machine that represent the drives present on the client computer. When native NT file systems, such as NTFS and FAT, access the drives, NTRecover manages communications over the serial cable to the client software to transfer disk data back and forth between the two machines. As far as Windows NT on the host machine is concerned, the drives created by NTRecover are indistinguishable from the local drives present on the host, and so they can be manipulated with Windows NT disk utilties, including high-level tools like the Windows NT Explorer, and low-level tools such as chkdsk.

Be sure to check out Remote Recover, which provides you all the capabilities of NTRecover except that it works over TCP/IP LAN/WANs instead of a serial cable. Remote Recover is ideal for high-speed backup/restore/repair, especially when large amounts of data are involved.

NTRecover is a program designed to repair drives that are inacessible due to misconfigured or missing software. It is not meant for drives that have been physically damaged or with substantial destruction of on-disk data.

Requirements:

· NTRecover can access drives accessible using the Int 13 interface. This includes IDE drives and most SCSI drives (Int 13 based drives are also those supported by disk utilities such as PowerQuest's Partition Magic). If you are unsure whether a given drive is supported, try running FDISK /STATUS from DOS. If FDISK can read the drive correctly then NTRecover should be able to as well.