Hard disk failure shocker

[Charlie Footstool]

I'd appreciate any feedback you have to offer about this...

A friend of mine chose to power my machine off just after POST at the start of the boot sequence, resulting in a wiped boot sector.

When I stick the Windows XP cd in the drive to boot and attempt repair, it detects the C drive as unpartitioned with no file system.


Aside from not booting, the disk appears to be functioning normally and I'm reasonably sure that the raw data will still be there.

I'd like to know if anyone can recommend me some software to put on another machine so I can plug in this failed hard disk and recover anything I can find. I'm sure there must exist software that can do this?

Any help appreciated.

[Vaipon]

As long as the FAT (file alloc table) is intact on the drive, you can just put it on the IDE cable of another machine. If the drive was formatted in NTFS, you will need to slave it off another Windows XP machine. The drive should be automatically detected and assigned a new letter, and you can just browse it as normal. The only files you won't have access to is any you encrypted, because these are tied to specific user accounts (which won't be on the other PC).

[Charlie Footstool]

I got the machine to boot off the windows XP cd, which left me with a commnad prompt...

I could not access the failed drive whatsoever (i.e. c:\>dir details all the stuff that is on my SECOND hard disk, that which I would usually find on d:\&gt, it was like it wasn't even there even though it is detected without problem at POST.

I'm beginning to think that this problem is alot deeper than i first thought.

lesson learned: do not let your know nothing mates piss about with your pc.

[eghamninja]

From the XP command prompt type "fixmbr \Device\HardDisk0" which will attempt to write a new boot record to the drive which may fix your problem. Also a "fixboot c:" may do some good as well.