Live cd, blew up my mbr

Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 11/24/2008 - 06:35.

Data Recovery forum

XP Home, I was running the live cd and fooled with the partitioning tool. Boink, turned it into unallocated space. Backups, who needs steenking backups?

I'm going to raw write the hdd to another, if I have to recover the data the hard way.

Reinstall the windows installation exactly as it was, this will be to the exact original hdd. Which will be a utility FAT partition and a NTFS (C:) partition.

Copy that mbr. Rewrite the saved/ damaged mess to the hdd. Then insert the saved mbr.

Is there a chance this will work? Thank you.

Yourbest and safest bet is

Submitted by andrew on Mon, 11/24/2008 - 07:07.

Yourbest and safest bet is to use Testdisk. Since the partition table is the only thing that was damaged, I expect you to be able to recover 100 percent of your data.

Testdisk should be able to detect and restore those partitions to your partition table.

After that is done, use the XP install disk to reinstall the MRB (use the recovery console to restore the bootloader.)

Testdisk is how I found your

Submitted by Sano (not verified) on Mon, 11/24/2008 - 08:46.

Testdisk is how I found your page! I haven't been home to the machine yet.

Andrew, perfecto! testdisk

Submitted by Sano (not verified) on Tue, 11/25/2008 - 00:39.

Andrew, perfecto!

testdisk did find, on Deeper Search, a third partition. Other disk editing tools found a "bios" partition. Something particular to my Dell I suppose. Grrr.

I ran testdisk from your Rescue-Remix boot cd, live.

sudo
fdisk partition

Disk /dev/sdb 250GB/232GiB

--
Pass 1:

1.) * FAT16 > 32M 401562 size in sectors [DellUtility]

2.) P HPFS-NTFS 487990440 [Local Disk]

--
Pass 2: Deeper Search

1.) D FAT16 > 32M 401562 size in sectors [DellUtility]

2.) D FAT16 > 32M 4192902 size in sectors [DellUtil]

3.) D HPFS-NTFS 487990440 size in sectors [Local Disk]

Note: The utility partition is available only thru the F12 > Boot Menu. It's a FAT partition.

Note: Disk editing tools available on the Ulimate Boot Disk cd read the, perhaps strange, pass 2- number 2 result as some sort of bios partition. Some of the tools went into an unresolvable loop as a page fault.

I rewrote the partition table according to the first pass, after re arranging the actual boot drive tags, instead of the improper * that was given the physically first Utility Partition.

Rebooted -as testdisk instructed. I ran testdisk again, it still wanted to mark the partitions incorrectly. I closed down the tool.

Rebooted with my Dell restore disk, booted to the Recovery Console, and almost ran Fixmbr and Fixboot commands. I did not. The recovery console is an M$ tool not a Dell tool. I figgered the (physically first) Utility partition would be seen as part of the os. (bad gimshee(sp))

Pulled the restore disk and booted to the F12 boot menu. Selected the Utility partition and booted, right into XP. Before it completed the XP boot though, chkdisk auto ran and repaired "dirty data". Yup, that's what it said. No problem, all my data was there.

I started Seagate's version of Acronis to image and backup the C: drive, to an used, apparently good, WD 160gb HDD. It failed. There's debris somewhere.

I ran Disk Fixer - Avantaquest. No errors. I'll save the data and reinstall everything.

Thanks for your site, short and sweet!!