Steve said:
I have recently been forced to perform a repair installation of XP Home due
to a corrupted registry message.
The repair installation left we with no option but to format the hard disc
and perform a full new clean installation.
When the machine tried to boot, the boot record (or whatever) has been
cleaned and now the disk is totally inoperational.
So any ideas on how to repair the disk? The disk is an 500g Seagate an less
than 2 years old with light use.
Let me be clear - the disk was working fine, until XP reformatted it. Now
the disc is trashed.
Start, by slaving it to another computer, for a look. In other words,
another computer has a working boot disk, and the trashed disk can be
connected as a data disk. Is it still visible ? Can you save the
user data files at least ? Google on "Take Ownership", if the host
computer is denied access to the files.
And you should be as clear as possible, about what has happened. A repair
install should not format the disk. Maybe something like a clean install
could do that, but you'd know, when heading down that road, there
would be consequences. You need to explain as clearly as you can, what
steps you followed. You can search one of the image search engines,
for a picture of what screen you were using.
http://www.altavista.com/image/default
http://images.google.ca/imghp?hl=en&tab=gi
A repair install, finds an existing partition, so that it can copy
over the system files again.
http://philscomputerrepair.com/images/xp_repair_install.jpg
A clean install, might have offered an option like this. This case,
might be with a new disk, which has no file system on it. If the
file system for C: was damaged, or the partition table was missing,
you might have seen this (followed by your "format" operation).
And if "C:" was listed, and you selected C:, then that would be
a different scenario. Someone helping you, needs to know as precisely
as possible, what you saw, and what you did.
http://www.theeldergeek.com/images/XP Home Setup Graphic/FF.gif
If a partition table was damaged, you can use TestDisk to fix that.
Of course, the more operations you've done after that, the more
damage you've done. Some of these tools aren't going to do anything
productive, if you've done too many things to the disk. TestDisk can
even find partitions which were deleted long ago, and when I was
testing this, in fact I didn't want that partition to come back.
So the configuration it offers to you, might not be what you want.
You need some idea, how many partitions were on the drive before,
to know whether to accept and write out, a new partition table.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step
Formatting doesn't necessarily delete everything, so there may still
be some stuff you can salvage.
If you want to try a file scavenger, and copy whatever can be found
off the trashed disk, you can try this. One poster a while back,
got some data off a drive using this. You would likely need a spare
disk, to provide enough space for recovery.
http://www.pricelesswarehome.org/WoundedMoon/win32/driverescue19d.html
Some of the endless stream of $39.95 data recovery applications,
will offer to scan a disk to see if they can see some data. And
then, to actually get the data, you have to pay them for a license
key or whatever.
Paul
