Hard drive repair software....
Beau Schwabe
Posts: 6,572
Anyone know of a 'Boot CD' hard drive repair software that I can manipulate and direct the MBR (Master Boot Record)
My wife's laptop is having issues and in not fully understanding the errors of my ways, I have made the initial MBR point to itself rather than the valid partition it is supposed to point to. ... So long story short, since it points to itself, it perpetually boots :-(
I'm not sure how to redirect the pointer to the partition that it should be booting from.
BTW) I can read the data from the partition I wish to boot to using a "Linux Live Boot CD" and have made a backup of it that way.
Hope this makes sense, and I can just find a way to change the MBR pointer rather than a complete re-install.
Big thanks
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Beau Schwabe
IC Layout Engineer
Parallax, Inc.
My wife's laptop is having issues and in not fully understanding the errors of my ways, I have made the initial MBR point to itself rather than the valid partition it is supposed to point to. ... So long story short, since it points to itself, it perpetually boots :-(
I'm not sure how to redirect the pointer to the partition that it should be booting from.
BTW) I can read the data from the partition I wish to boot to using a "Linux Live Boot CD" and have made a backup of it that way.
Hope this makes sense, and I can just find a way to change the MBR pointer rather than a complete re-install.
Big thanks
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Beau Schwabe
IC Layout Engineer
Parallax, Inc.
Comments
1. First, restart your computer with the Windows XP setup disk in the CD drive.
If you don’t have your original disk, borrow one or download a ISO image from a torrent site.
2. When prompted, boot from the CD drive by pressing any key. If Windows loads automatically,
you will first have to enter the BIOS setup and change the order of the boot devices to start with the CD drive.
3. Once the setup loads, you will see the option to press R to repair a Windows installation.
4. Once the Recovery Console loads up, you will have to type in a number that corresponds to your Windows installation.
This is normally just 1. Press Enter and then type in the Administrator password.
5. Now at the prompt, type in fixmbr. Your damaged MBR will now be replaced with a new master boot record and your computer should now be able to boot properly. Note that you may also want to run the fixboot command to repair the boot sector with a new one.
Also, make sure you only use these commands on a system with one operating system installed. If you have more than one operating system installed, fixmbr and fixboot could mess up everything.
I've used this a few times with success in the situation your described.
OBC
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We use this and other software to create and restore images for the computers at the school district diskpart is probably what you need.
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- Stephen
What started all this was my 5 year old dropped my wife's laptop ... 'I think' it just damaged the MBR section, as I am able to read 'data' from it and was able to copy 'some' data to an external 1TB USB drive. <-- And that may be all that I can hope for at this point. ... Grrrr !!!
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Beau Schwabe
IC Layout Engineer
Parallax, Inc.
-Phil
Can't emphasize this enough. Once you lose a chunk of media and it rattles around inside, the chances of growing damage are too high to ignore.
Physical destruction is _so_ much more fun. Rip the cover off, spin it up, lathe the oxide off with a screwdriver. Salvage all the nice fun bits you might want to play with (motor / bearings / magnets) and beat the snot out of the rest of it with a hammer.
In the old days, 240V on the PCB used to be fun too, but they don't have anywhere near as many Tantalum and Electrolytics on them as they used to in the full-height days. The discrete semis used to go off with a great crack too. (Disclaimer, we used to have an armoured safe room with assault rated glass to do this stuff in)
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"I mean, if I went around sayin' I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me they'd put me away!"
Or grab the linux based SystemRescueCD which will pretty much do what ADD will, but with more and for less [noparse]:)[/noparse]
Testdisk is the application you want to fix the partition tables, MBR and bootable bits.
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"I mean, if I went around sayin' I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me they'd put me away!"
You can try Hiren's Boot CD. i've used it many times with great results it has alot of different utilities. you can find it here...
http://www.hirensbootcd.net/
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I'm just 7*1027 atoms floating through time and space in close formation. -KF4IXM
"the linux based SystemRescueCD" ... combined with my dumb luck is how I messed up the "MBR and bootable bits" in the first place.
Thanks for everyone's suggestions....
At this point I'm done with it and shelving the problem for awhile, because now it won't even boot past the point where it begins to look for a CD making it a rather difficult catch 22 (even if I specify "Boot from a CD first")
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Beau Schwabe
IC Layout Engineer
Parallax, Inc.
Well, if its any consolation I learned my stuff after zeroing the 1st Megabyte of a 60MB hard disk full of zip files years ago. I learned how to build a partition table, MBR, root directory and pair of FAT's from scratch with a hex editor. Lucky there was no fragmentation [noparse]:)[/noparse]
As OBC said, the Windows recovery disk, or booting MSDOS and using FDISK /MBR would put back the bits you need, but honestly, testdisk is great at automated repairs of most catastrophic errors, including guessing partition table contents if you've really made a mess. Testdisk does a good job of MFT repair for NTFS volumes also.
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"I mean, if I went around sayin' I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me they'd put me away!"
http://www.5starsupport.com/·helped me fix my computer for free.· They've only asked for a voluntary donation.
XP disc works
Hirens Boot CD
Plus one more I keep available in the shop at all times is Live XP.
It has the xp funtions, hirens boot, plus a ton of tools. Not to mention that it is a PE and can help you get those files off even if it isn't bootable.
There is some recovery software in it also that pulls up stuff on a hard drive that you thought you had long since formatted over.
The download comes with an OS too, called Last XP, but it isn't as great as they make it out to be!
There is hardly a program in it that doesn't get flagged as a virus by most virus software, but I have been using it to recover peoples documents and hard drives for a year and a half now! Since it runs in ram only you don't have much to worry about.
Good lock!
Ken
Spinrite is only good for one thing. In-place data recovery. It won't fix issues with your logical configuration, and in most cases of a failing drive it will kill it faster and do more harm than good. If you've got one or two grown defects on a Windows disk and you don't want to re-format then it's probably a good bet though.
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"I mean, if I went around sayin' I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me they'd put me away!"
CMD
if you boot from floppy you will have to go to the dos directory or system depending on what you have I would strongly suggest DOS 6 its free to download now
type in FDISK /MBR you will be amazed how many truly damned drives this has worked on of course format it format /u
then just go back to whatever OS you are using and install from scratch
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