Sunday, July 5, 2009

Unattended Installation May Cause Partition Loss in Windows

In Microsoft Windows operating system, an Unattended Installation is an automatic installation procedure, which is used for installing or upgrading the operating system with minimum user interference. This is usually employed during key rollouts where having administrators and technicians is not affordable. In some cases, the installation may not complete successfully and you might come across serious file system corruption and partition loss while performing unattended installation. At this point, you need to carry out Partition Recovery using third party tools to recover lost partitions and data.

One of the most essential components of the unattended installation procedure is Answer file. This is an ordinary text file that instructs the operating system setup program to how to install and configure the operating system. When the installation process goes on, setup follows the instructions that are given in answer file. You can carry out unattended installation only by running any of the two Windows setup utility- Winnt32.exe or Winnt.exe as it is an automatic process.

Though, carrying out unattended installation is a user friendly and easy process, but in some situations it may harm your computer. If you carry out unattended installation using the Winnt.exe tool from a FAT partition on drive that is more than 4 GB in size, it might damage other NTFS partitions of hard drive. Installation parameters are specified in the Unattend.txt file as underwritten:

"OEM Preinstall = yes
File System = Convert NTFS
Extend OEM Partition = 1"

After installation, when you start the system, NTFS corruption is recognized, either by inability to properly start due to damaged or missing files or by below given ChkDsk error:

"CHKDSK is verifying indexes...
Correcting error in index %I30 for file 100
Correcting error in index %I30 for file 100
Index verification completed.
CHKDSK detected minor inconsistencies on the drive.
Errors found. CHKDSK cannot continue in read-only mode."

If the NTFS corruption is severe, your system might stop responding during GUI-mode part of setup or you may receive a number of error messages. In such situations, your hard drive partitions may become inaccessible and you need to opt for Partition Recovery Software to retrieve them.

These software are particularly designed to effectively scan the hard drive and retrieve all of the missing, lost or inaccessible hard drive partitions. These tools come equipped with interactive and simple graphical user interface and thus let your perform quick and easy Partition Recovery.

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is the most advanced and effective tool to recover lost partitions. It recovers all FAT32, VFAT, NTFS and NTFS 5 file system partitions. This Partition Recovery Software is designed to recover partitions from Microsoft Windows 7 RC1, Vista, 2003, XP and 2000.

Author is researching on how data loss or partition loss occur. For lost partition recovery problems and recovery of data author suggested to use partition recovery software.

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