Disaster Struck ...

[Tom]

Its reported to be 30 Gb (correct) with 10,2 Gb free

What does this mean? A disk is not the same as a volume, your description is confusing.

The DP analysis log says there should be a 30Gb volume on the disk. I'm not sure what you mean by 10,2 Gb free: unpartitioned disk space or free space in the volume? From your description I can't determine whether you are actually looking at the contents of the volume (meaning you can access it) or you are looking at an empty disk. If you are looking at the contents of the volume (is there a drive letter?) but are not seeing anything, something catastrophic happened and repairs are not possible. I'm kind of assuming that that is what you meant, and if so, it's over (unless perhaps if the disk has read problems and cloning overcomes that particular problem). The only thing to do then is what I said earlier: re-install and rebuild the situation by hand.

So, what exactly did you mean?

[wabe]

Its reported to be 30 Gb (correct) with 10,2 Gb free

What does this mean? A disk is not the same as a volume, your description is confusing.


So, what exactly did you mean?

A ran a Live CD and used the file manager to inspect the "volume" which reports the above number when selecting "properties". The disk just contain one partition so disk is sort of the same as volume or partition at least in a layman's perspective.
I tried running partition repair and refresh MBR but no difference. The disk is most likely toast. I noticed one strange thing in DP when trying to activate after repair. The data disk (the one with only data) was set as "active".

[Tom]

I noticed one strange thing in DP when trying to activate after repair. The data disk (the one with only data) was set as "active".

Yes we saw that too, no biggy, but it might be clever to reset that. Look here for info:
http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/dp_manual/guide_partattr.htm

I tried running partition repair and refresh MBR but no difference.

Yes, as expected.

Okay, then I was right. You CAN see what's on the volume (you can access it) but nothing's there. Like I said, that's bad. My previous post applies.

[wabe]

I replaced the drive and installed a basic XP installation it. Hooked up the old disk as an USB-drive it is now completely unreadable.
Next step is to figure out how to boot into the important OS i.e recreate the dual-boot possibility

[Joep]

Hooked up the old disk as an USB-drive it is now completely unreadable.

I don't know what that means (eg. Windows doesn't show it, throws an (error) message?), but if it contains important data you can try recovering that with iRecover.

[wabe]

I don't know what that means (eg. Windows doesn't show it, throws an (error) message?), but if it contains important data you can try recovering that with iRecover.

The drive shows up in file manager but cannot be opened.
Doesn't really matter since it's not the currently used OS - scrapped now

More importantly I got my system up running again after quite a struggle which involved, disconnecting all drives except the "win2008r2 OS-drive", using the recovery console on the Windows setup disk, reconstructing the  Bootmgr and finnally running a utility on the setup disk that do a "startup reparation".
It's seems there was some kind of data corruption on this drive not detected by DP. But all's well that end well!

[Tom]

Yes, pretty much as I expected this to go. Excellent.