data recovery lost/damaged boot sector

[wooducoodu]

a friend of mine asked me last night to help them fix their system, they're
getting a no OS message and it appears as if the drive is no longer even
formatted or partitioned. i haven't had a chance to actually check the
system myself yet but i have a feeling it's not a hardware failure and i'm
thinking it might be a virus or something messed up the drives boot sector.
(they never update their antivirus software and don't run a firewall) their
critical data is backed up at least so i'm tempted to just re partition and
format the drive, start over and let that be a lesson to them but i was
wondering are there any decent freeware tools for recovering data in this
situation? if not what are the good payware tools?

 

[wooducoodu]

oh the system in question is a fairly heavily modified old dell r400 (intel
440bx, 1000mhz P3, 60gb 5400rpm maxtor drive...), running windows 98.

 

[Peter]

a friend of mine asked me last night to help them fix their system, they're
getting a no OS message and it appears as if the drive is no longer even
formatted or partitioned. i haven't had a chance to actually check the
system myself yet but i have a feeling it's not a hardware failure and i'm
thinking it might be a virus or something messed up the drives boot sector.
(they never update their antivirus software and don't run a firewall) their
critical data is backed up at least so i'm tempted to just re partition and
format the drive, start over and let that be a lesson to them but i was
wondering are there any decent freeware tools for recovering data in this
situation? if not what are the good payware tools?

Here's some that you can check out:
Virtual Lab, Handy Recovery, Active Undelete and Easy
Recover Pro
Also just do a google on 'file recovery' and you'll find loads of info.

 

[wooducoodu]

yes, i found quite a few hits through google but it's difficult to tell the
good from the crap.

 

[JAD]

is the drive auto detected in bios? did the cmos battery fail....?
Like someone mentioned in an earlier post, they changed the head,
lands and sectors by adding them manually, This of course wrecked the
drive configuration.

 

[wooducoodu]

the drive is detected and the system starts up fine until it get's to where
it should load windows. there's definitely been no one changing settings in
the BIOS.

 

[Dave C.]

the drive is detected and the system starts up fine until it get's to where
it should load windows. there's definitely been no one changing settings in
the BIOS.

There are some bad boot sector viruses going around, loaded by trojan horses
received in e-mail. -Dave

 

[Jon Danniken]

I would just take the drive home and fiddle with it hooked up to one of my computers.
YMMV

Jon