Data recovery - XP

[J]

Hello,
I was helping a friend try and recovery his XP home installation.
He had over 300 viruses that were detected by Symantec.
Symantec cleaned what it could and we rebooted.
System would hang up just after the POST.
I booted into system recovery console.
I did a fixboot and rebooted. I did not do a fixmbr.
Upon reboot "NTLDR not found" error message.
I booted up into BART PE and took a look at the C drive.
Nothing found!! It identified the disk as a 10MB disk, not the 500GB
that it is.

What data recovery software do you's recommend?
I'm confidant that I will be able to recovery the data,
as fixboot would not write over the data, but just need to identify
the right tool.
TIA

 

[Pegasus [MVP]]

Hello,
I was helping a friend try and recovery his XP home installation.
He had over 300 viruses that were detected by Symantec.
Symantec cleaned what it could and we rebooted.
System would hang up just after the POST.
I booted into system recovery console.
I did a fixboot and rebooted. I did not do a fixmbr.
Upon reboot "NTLDR not found" error message.
I booted up into BART PE and took a look at the C drive.
Nothing found!! It identified the disk as a 10MB disk, not the 500GB
that it is.

What data recovery software do you's recommend?
I'm confidant that I will be able to recovery the data,
as fixboot would not write over the data, but just need to identify
the right tool.
TIA

With 300 viruses you were wasting your time trying to clean the system. The
appropropriate course of action would have been to save all user files, then
format the disk and perform a fresh installation, in particular if your
friend did not bother keeping a back-up of up his important files.

You could try Acronis Recovery Expert in order to restore the missing
partition. However, if you're not experienced with partition manipulation
and if your friend's files are important then you should ask a suitably
qualified expert to perform the recovery.

 

[3c273]

Have a look at TestDisk. http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
Louis

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Hello,
I was helping a friend try and recovery his XP home installation.
He had over 300 viruses that were detected by Symantec.
Symantec cleaned what it could and we rebooted.

300 viruses is an enormous number. Nobody with anywhere that many
should attempt to use an anti-virus program to clean the computer. It
is almost impossible that it will be successful. The only thing to do
at this point is a clean reinstallation of Windows.

 

[Patrick Keenan]

Hello,
I was helping a friend try and recovery his XP home installation.
He had over 300 viruses that were detected by Symantec.
Symantec cleaned what it could and we rebooted.
System would hang up just after the POST.
I booted into system recovery console.
I did a fixboot and rebooted. I did not do a fixmbr.
Upon reboot "NTLDR not found" error message.
I booted up into BART PE and took a look at the C drive.
Nothing found!! It identified the disk as a 10MB disk, not the 500GB
that it is.

What data recovery software do you's recommend?
I'm confidant that I will be able to recovery the data,
as fixboot would not write over the data, but just need to identify
the right tool.

300 viruses? Don't waste your time. Copy the data off, wipe the drive and
reinstall. Or, get a new drive, install clean to that, then copy the data
back.

This will probably take you less time and give a more reliable result.

HTH
-pk

 

[Randem]

Looks like you need to recover your partition. By any chance was the type of
file system reported as RAW instead of NTFS?

Ref: http://www.randem.com/discus/messages/9402/9406.html?1236319938


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