Invalid Partition - Fixboot Made my Disk FAT32 not NTFS - Help Please

M

Montor

I encountered an invalid partition error on a secondary drive in my PC.
After searching the net for advice, I used the Fixboot command from the
recovery console to solve the issue. However, it determined that the
disk was FAT32 not NTFS, so now whilst I can read the drive, all of the
folders and the data appears corrupted.

How can I write an NTFS boot sector onto the disk to fix this issue?
 
G

Glen

You can try fixmbr but what had you done to the disk. It can't just change
from ntfs to fat32 something changed it. You must have run some software and
its become corupted. Your only hope is restore from backup. If you don't
have a backup your sc....d.
 
M

Montor

Definitely haven't done anything to the disk. The process went as
follows:

- Busted disk was my boot drive with XP installed (call it Drive 1).
- Installed new blank drive (Drive 2) and swapped Drive 1 to be slave
drive
- Booted Windows XP from CD (so never booted into Windows after
swapping drives) and installed onto Drive 2
- Drive 1 was unreadable when Windows installation was finished, never
touched it, installed on it or anything during process. Showed up as
"Bad" under the disk management software
- Removed Drive 2 and put Drive 1 back as master disk and attempted to
boot from it and got "Bad Partition" error.
- Booted from Windows XP CD into recovery area and ran chkdsk which
identified a bad partition and boot problem
- Ran FixBoot which worked, but stated that the drive was FAT32 which
it definitely never has been since I bought it and installed it myself
when I built the system and it had Windows XP installed from new as
NTFS

Now stuck in this predicament. The data is definately still there as I
can see loads of folders, but their names and files are all corrupted.
Everything I have read on FixBoot is about it sorting out NTFS boot
problems, so I was incredibly shocked when it declared it was writing a
FAT boot onto the disk.

Would appreciate any further suggestions, otherwise I am going to try
FixMBR or the other alternative I was thinking about was deliberately
wiping the boot sector and using a software solution to recover the
data from the NTFS areas.

Thanks
 

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