G
Guest
I foolishly tried these utilities on a laptop hard drive, before attempting
to backup data, and they made the problem worse. The original problem was
that win xp pro would not boot, even in safe mode, and kept cycling to a blue
screen. After booting from the cd, and trying fixmbr and fixboot, a reboot
attempt reported 'ntldr not found'. I used a cable adapter to insert the
laptop drive into a desktop pc, and then I found that the boot partition,
which was originally ntfs, was now reported as a 22gb fat partition. I have
tried several recovery tools, which list a lot of files, but only recover the
smaller files successfully. (A second 11gb fat32 partition on the same disk
is totally accessible.) There is a large (490mb) pst file, which appears to
recover, but then contains no messages, and appears to have been crossed with
other files. There were a few bad sectors on the drive, which might have been
the origianal problem, and if I had connected it to the other computer first,
I mght have been able to backup my files, but I seem to have limited my
options now. I believe, if i knew how, I could manually edit some sectors, so
that windows knows it is an ntfs, and not fat partition, and read the files
properly, but is there a utility to help with this? Is there any way for me
to unfixmbr, and unfixboot? I want to try to copy sector 0 from another drive
with similar-sized partitions, but is there a utility to help with this? Has
anyone had experience with a similar problem?
to backup data, and they made the problem worse. The original problem was
that win xp pro would not boot, even in safe mode, and kept cycling to a blue
screen. After booting from the cd, and trying fixmbr and fixboot, a reboot
attempt reported 'ntldr not found'. I used a cable adapter to insert the
laptop drive into a desktop pc, and then I found that the boot partition,
which was originally ntfs, was now reported as a 22gb fat partition. I have
tried several recovery tools, which list a lot of files, but only recover the
smaller files successfully. (A second 11gb fat32 partition on the same disk
is totally accessible.) There is a large (490mb) pst file, which appears to
recover, but then contains no messages, and appears to have been crossed with
other files. There were a few bad sectors on the drive, which might have been
the origianal problem, and if I had connected it to the other computer first,
I mght have been able to backup my files, but I seem to have limited my
options now. I believe, if i knew how, I could manually edit some sectors, so
that windows knows it is an ntfs, and not fat partition, and read the files
properly, but is there a utility to help with this? Is there any way for me
to unfixmbr, and unfixboot? I want to try to copy sector 0 from another drive
with similar-sized partitions, but is there a utility to help with this? Has
anyone had experience with a similar problem?