UK BOINC Team Forum

Hi all,

Anyone have any useful knowledge about hard drives losing their MBR and partition tables.

I've suffered a problem with a 40Gb HDD, which although getting on a bit, had been reliable to date.

Now, it cannot boot a PC (into Win XP Pro 32bit) and I've tried a few different programs to see what's wrong with it (having connected it to a another working PC).

I've tried EaseUS Partition Master, EaseUs Partition Recovery, MiniTool Partition Wizard, EaseUs Data Recovery, TestDisk - and apart from them all taking ages to actually run through each of their operations, so far, each has failed to actually see anything useful...

(I'm aware that there is a back-up partition table stored on the drive, but I've not found a utility that can restore this to the MBR).

Quite a while ago, there used to be a great program called Norton Disk Doctor, plus a whole suite of other really useful utilities, which quickly fixed all manner of issues - but since all the Peter Norton company was sold to Symantec, there hasn't been anything like it.

Anyone have a favoured tool, that might help me out?

regards
Tim
edit: added OS info

Just found this if it's any help http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/20 ... ecord.html

Mike

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the info. Not sure it's of use, as it was running Win XP Pro.....and I'm not sure that the info shown is relevant - I'll check the CD and see

regards
Tim
PS Have now added OS info to the O/P.

Hi all,

Another day has passed and my poor old HDD has seen a barrage of tools thrown at it...the gist of it is that the NTFS MFT and MFT Mirror have both been corrupted (somehow), resulting in the entire drive not being accessible.

I've tried to use ZAR to image the drive, but it's been so slow. Now using TestDisk to do likewise, after it too, failed to repair the MFT.

What this also means is that I'm now down to one PC, running BOINC as the second one (that controls my work BU farm) is offline, running the imaging software....and the data recovery is far more important than a few days of crunching BOINC.

With luck, I can resolve this within the next few days.

regards
Tim

Ooer looks bad.

May have to try a proper recover program like 'Getdataback' or 'zero recovery assumption'  (available from all good pirate bay sites!) Though you may have to pay for Restorer 2000 though you can try for free http://www.restorer2000.com/ ($49.99)