hard drive mbr overwritten

  • Thread starter Thread starter MIke
  • Start date Start date
M

MIke

i have xp on my pc, w/o sp1 and when my slave drive
reached 137gb my pc ran a chkdsk and apparently started
overwriting itself. (xp does not support large drives w/o
sp1) By doing this it overwrote my MBR on track 0 , now
xp reads my d drive as 200 gb free. data rec programs
don't even see the data that was there except file
scavenger 2.1 which has a option called defunct volume
search, and it shows all the data that i lost.
how do i mbr and data, hopefully easily w/o using a data
recovery program that requires 137 gb space to transfer it
all.

SOS
mike
 
FDISK /MBR
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NO!!

In this context, his MBR is likely overwritten, and will most likely
not end with the valid 55AA signature. Using FDisk /MBR in htis
context will create a valid MBR but zero'd partition table!

Yes, the partition table's garbage if the whole MBR was splatted - but
with a valid MBR comes "just format and re-install", and then it
really is bye-bye data.

You'd need to recreate what was overwritten in order to point to the
data that was not overwritten, then evacuate that data, then rebuild.

http://users.iafrica.com/c/cq/cquirke has pages on data recovery that
provide the info needed to do that in FATxx; it doesn't cover NTFS,
because I don't know NTFS well enough to write such material.

As you'd see, it's geeky - but possible as long as you DON'T slash
around formatting, just re-installing Windows, etc. It may be that
only the tip of the start of the HD was hit; in any case, volumes
other than C: should be recoverable.

Er... you didn't run that big HD as one big NTFS C:, did you?
If so, well, you've just discovered why that is a Bad Idea :-(


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