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  Asked: Jan 25 2005   7:12 AM GMT
  Asked by: microsolve

Hard Disk Data Recovery - NTFS MBR Failure-2


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Hello everyone,

I have a Western Digital 800JB ATA 80GB 7200rpm drive that was
used for a time as a boot drive for WXPP.
It was replaced recently as a boot drive by a smaller
40GB drive, and the 80GB drive relegated to backup
duties (slaved to a CD drive on a 40-wire cable).
Before full transfer of all info from backup to
boot drive could be completed, drive stopped
responding.
The WXP disk utility indicated a
formatted drive of unknown format.
Partition Magic indicated a NTFS partition, but
greyed out most options.
WXP CD boot in recovery mode also unable to
read the partition, but the fixMBR utility indicated a
faulty MBR.
Mobo BIOS recognises the drive only when the
jumper is set to slave.
Booting the drive (as a slave) briefly displays the
WXP boot screen, then spontaneously reboots.
After running the WXP fixmbr utility, it will no
longer even display the WXP boot screen, displaying an
invalid partition error message, and Partition Magic
indicates a HPFS partition, which it cannot convert
back to NTFS.

Can anyone suggest a way to recover the data and/or the drive? It is still under warranty, but the data is more important than the drive warranty!

Thanks in advance.

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Last Answered: Jan 25 2005  6:13 PM GMT  by Wrangler




Can you slave to 80GB drive and boot witht he old 40GB. Then maybe once you are in XP you can go to manage and use disk utliities there to pull up information or use partion magic to read the drive.

Just a guess without seeing the system, but before completely wiping the drive I would do that.
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mks3rd  |   Jan 27 2005  12:25PM GMT

You could try rebuilding the boot sector. Do you have the Western Digital drive tool disk? Slaving it to another bootable drive may work and have you swapped cables to see if that may be the issue..just guessing as I cannot tell without seeing the results of your trials…good luck…

 

microsolve  |   Jan 28 2005  1:35AM GMT

Thanks to all who have posted.

I am puzzled by the apparent divergence of this thread into two sub-threads, so I will answer the same to both. I have tried the WD tools. The Windows diagnostics tool crashed Windows, and the DOS disk panicked as soon as it was run, instructing me to contact technical support, which I have now done.

I will keep you posted on further developments.

Thanks again to all who have posted.

Mike

 

PeterMac  |   Jan 28 2005  6:48AM GMT

Will be very interested to hear how you get on with this. A lot of high capacity drives are supplied with manufacturer drivers that load from boot sector. These drivers usually perform some sector/track translations to get round limitations of older MB Bios. Running drive as a non bootable slave will have bypassed this feature, and probably corrupted drive beyond recovery. Running the fixMBR is likely to have destroyed the original drivers, and made the drive unbootable as well. Only people likely to be able to help on this are manufacturers who may be able to suggest some recovery options and supply software to recreate original boot drivers. Sorry to be so pessimistic, but had a similar problem with a drive a couple of years ago, and never did manage to recover anything from it.