Hello,

I am in need of a little assistance.

I am trying to run some AV scans using UBCD4WIN on a Dell Inspiron 8600 laptop. Unfortunately, though, when I boot to the cd, the hard drive does not get assigned a drive letter. I can see the drive in Disk Managment. It shows a 31MB FAT partition and a 37GB NTFS partition. When I attempt to right click the 37GB partition, "Change Drive Letter and Paths" is greyed out.

More info:

When I use Diskpart to display the details of the partition, it lists the following:

DISKPART> det part

Partition 2
Type: 44
Hidden: Yes
Active: Yes

* Volume 2 NTFS Partition 37GB Healthy

Should this partition be hidden? I attempted to unhide it using MBRWizard in Disk Tools, but it lists the partition as not being hidden anyway (???). I went ahead an unhid it, but nothing happened.

It turns out that I can assign a letter using diskpart with the ASSIGN command, but I have to do this every time I boot to UBCD4WIN on this particular computer. The only other drives are the RAMDISK on B: and the cd on X:. When assigned in this fashion, it receives the letter C:.

Is there any way that I can get the drive letter assigned automatically or resolve the issue that is causing UBCD4WIN to not assign one?

What does chkdsk say about the ntfs drive before you assign a drive letter?

How do I run chkdsk against a drive w/o a letter (it does not have a label either, and I can't seem to assign one.)

Nevermind the previous post, I assigned a letter from diskpart , assigned a label from the command line, and rebooted.

Here is what I get when I run chkdsk against it w/o a drive letter:

chkdisk hdd /f
The type of the file system is RAW.
CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives.

Disk Management has no trouble identifying it as NTFS, so why can't chkdsk?

Is the partition type identifier wrong in the partition table? Diskpart reports type 44, but shouldn't it be 07? I'm going to try to change it and see what happens.

Bingo! That was it. Type 44 is incorrect. I used TestDisk in disk tools to change the type to 07 and rewrite the partition table. I rebooted, and now it appears and gets assigned a drive letter! I had to also reactive the partition since there is a utility partition on the same drive.

One small question remains. I still cannot use chkdsk when referring to the label (chkdsk <label>), but I can if I use the drive letter (chkdsk c:). It still thinks that the partition type is RAW. Any thoughts?

I think 44 is the identifier for "GoBack". If you had GoBack installed on the drive prior to changing it to 07 then that explains why you couldn't access it.

Yes, it appears that GoBack is present on this computer. Do you know whether leaving the type at 07 will have any adverse effects with GoBack? I would prefer to leave it on 07 so that UBCD4WIN is easier to use on this computer.

I would recommend resetting the partition type back to what it was previously... then use GoBack itself to disable its features so normal disk access methods can allow you test the drive. A GoBack partition is incompatible with any standard disk utility. Your GoBack will have the detailed instructions on how to do it for the version you have installed.

This is turning a bit ugly now. I really hate Go Back.

@Pihahiroth
Please restore the partition back the way it was and hope there are no negative effects. Then try to remove Go Back the right way.
Also, please do not create topics that direct to this one. We already have many posts in the forum regarding Go Back. We will be adding information to the site's FAQ page about this and will hopefully be including a tool in the project that helps with this issue.

Thx. Sorry about that. I was hoping that I could alter the topic name to reflect the root of the issue, but it doesn't seem that I can. That's why I did that.

I meant the "ugly" remark to be directed to the fact that we now have a Go Back issue and that there could possibly be issue with the data on the HDD.

I don't blame you for making the topic you did, but I feel it's redundant. If a user searches for Go Back, they will see this topic and many others that provide useful information. The real solution is me finding the time to create a FAQ topic on the site so we can direct users to all the information we know about this in one area. There are a few other possible things that could help and we are working on them.

I sent you a PM apologizing for "calling you out" in public, that may not have been appropriate.

Sure, the topic is redundant for anyone who knows that he or she is dealing with GoBack, but I didn't know that at first. I searched the forums for instances of "drive letter" since my issue was that I couldn't assign a drive letter to the partition and didn't turn up anything after some searching. If I had searched GoBack, I would've known right away, but without knowing that I was dealing with a GoBack issue, I did not find the relevant topics.

Don't feel bad. I had a bit of a struggle with GoBack, myself.

I'm not sure at this late date if this can help or not... but perhaps you can still get the data from the system using this util from Symantec http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/gobac...&view=docid

Thanks for the info. Fortunately, all is well. I had a backup of this computer before I did the above. In case anyone is curious, this is what happened and how I recovered from it.

After changing the partition table entry back to 44, the system would not boot. I booted back into UBCD4WIN and set it to 07 with . I was then able to boot into the system even though GoBack was crippled. I decided to attempt to remove goback, but uninstall failed. To make a long story short, all standard methods for removing GoBack failed, including the Ctrl+Alt+G technique. I ended up having to download the Norton Removal Tool from Symantec and remove the entire Norton Systemworks installation (GoBack is bundled with it). Next, I rebooted and ran Ctrl+Alt+G and then pressed F, but it still didn't work. So, I booted into Windows Recovery Console and wrote a new MBR and boot files (FIXMBR and FIXBOOT). Only until then did I completely get it removed and everything returned to normal.

The lesson of the story: GoBack (and Symantec, IMO) is terrible!