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Failed hard drive

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by skip3

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Greetings all -
Working on a friend's desktop computer running XP Home. Symptom: at startup, system displays boot menu (safe mode, last known good, etc.). Regardless of the menu item selected, the system hard resets - all the way back to POST, then displays the boot menu again.

Put the XP Home CD in, switched the BIOS settings to boot from the CD. Enter Windows Setup, select "R" for recovery console, and the system begins to examine the drive - then freezes forever. I left it in this condition for 24 hours at one point with no progress or indicator of any status whatsoever.

Opened the case, extracted the Seagate 80GB SATA 3.5" drive, connected it to my laptop running XP PRO with a USB-to-IDE/SATA gadget I have for just such purposes.

On my laptop, Windows recognizes that there is a drive attached, and assigns it a drive letter, but will not allow me to access the drive thru Windows Explorer. Error message: "Drive F: is not accessable; the file or directory is corrupted and unreadable".

Enter Computer Management (right click on My Computer, 'manage'), and the drive shows as healthy with an active partition, but no file system.

I have a few low-level utilities (Acronis, Active@ Partition Recovery, etc.) which show that there are files on the drive, and will allow me to do a sector-by-sector backup of the drive, so I'm able to recover the data.

My question is this: I suspect that the MFT or MBR is corrupted. Can this be restored so that the disk can be accessed, and ultimately restored to a bootable condition?

Any suggestions would be appreciated -
S2

6 replies

by seanferd

Should be available through Recovery as FixMBR.
Otherwise, Fdisk is a DOS utility tou should be able to find on your system somewhere. That will fix a broken MBR. You can make a boot floppy and add Fdisk to it. Fdisk /status displays partition information.

by abhilash_kt

Hai

Think you lost your Partition of the Hardist

Is the partition was NTFS ?

Anyway if you know how to you Linux you can retrive your data very easly

by seanferd

Has recovery tools for which you do not even have to understand Linux to use.

by seanferd

For 2000/XP, don't use the DOS Fdisk. Use FixMBR from the recovery CD.

by robo_dev

Assuming that you can recover data files, it would be best to reformat it.

If the drive is old, it may be best to replace it. Make sure the PC power supply is OK and the PC is not running too hot. Maxtor/seagate have some pretty good diags to put the drive through it's paces.

If the FAT is corrupted, a utility would help you to recover, but I would not trust that it would fix everything.

The biggest concern is what caused the current problem...power surge? Virus? PC knocked over? Because you don't want to have to do the same job twice.

Your friend owes you big time.

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