MBR Issue

I came downstairs and my windows XP (up to date) was bluescreened. I tried to reboot, but nothing. I switched to my windows 2000 drive, and it booted fine. The 1TB winXP drive appears to win 2000 as a 128GB unformatted removable drive. I ran Western Digital diagnostics, and the Smart stuff passed.

I am assuming that I got hit by a MBR "virus" that trashed my MBR and partition table. I don't know how to prove that, though. Nor, the best way to repair it or recover files.

I am currently running EASEUS, and it has found a FAT Boot Record and is currently scanning though NTFS where it has found an NTFS boot record and 300K+ files. I'm pretty sure that I formatted the drive with 1 large NTFS partition when I installed XP.

What is the optimum approach to the brain surgery I need to perform to fix this drive or recover files?

Thanks

MBG

 

Boot off the XP install cd, enter recovery mode, enter command: FixMBR and/or FixBoot. Half asleep with a screaming sleep fighting baby on my lap. But I think I got that right. :tired:zzz:tired

 

I'm guessing (maybe wrong) that the damage goes beyond the MBR. The partition table is corrupted. The drive shows up as unformatted. There needs to be a formatted partition before there can be an MBR. Is there software that will tell more about the partitions and file system damage?

The drive shows up as Removable Disk (H: ). When I click on it, it says the drive is unformatted and asks if I want to format it.

EASEUS Data Recovery found a "partition" that had all my files. EASUS said it was 128GB, but it found all 750GB of files. It's like something put an uninititialized FAT32 on the disk.

I've fixed a classic MBR virus with the recovery console before. The MBR damage did not make the whole file system appear gone, and the disk unformatted. I expect I will have to fix the MBR once I fix the filesystem.

 

Maybe boot to a Linux CD? I use Mint - download and burn the image, boot to the CD, run it live, and you should be able to access everything from there.

 

I am already booting to another system and trying to access the drive. As I said, it appears to that system as Removable Disk (H: ) and the system thinks it is not formatted. The file system is damaged.

 

Maybe look again at the Western Digital utilities, see if there are other options?

 

What is the simplest Linux I can run from a CD (no hd install)? I'm fine with Linux command line only, no network, etc.

I've been told (I guess this is what you were saying) that sometimes Linux will see the filesystem while Windows can't.

If that is the case, is there anyway to repair it? Rather than try to copy everything? (750GB)

Thanks for helping, BTW.

MGB

 

There are some good threads going on about different distros in the Linux forum, such as this one. I prefer Mint (link above), but I've only used it to recover data, not fix file systems. You might still give it (or one of the others) a try - seems like you'd be able to shuffle some critical files between a good machine and the bad drive, try to get it cranked up.

 

You might also give TestDisk a look.

 

Thanks for all the good information.

I'll be checking it all out, and will post results.

Thanks

MBG