Hard drive recovery

C

C0R3YW

New Member
I can't acces my drive. A string of issues ended up withme at the recovery console running fixmbr, now I get the invalid partition table error at statup.

I did some homework and several test utilities (testdisk, partition recovery) were suggested, but I can't figure out how to install them or boot from a disk where they are stored and useable.

Help please and thanks.

Dell dimension 4700 running windows XP
 
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Did you also use the fixboot command in recovery console? If not you need to. What issues were you having before you started trying to fix it?
 
johnb35 said:
Did you also use the fixboot command in recovery console? If not you need to. What issues were you having before you started trying to fix it?
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure I did the fixboot deal.

The computer was brutally bogged down and I was trying to clean it up, then I disabled a bunch of start up programs and it all went downhill after that. I couldn't even do a system restore.

Edit: did a fixboot, it wrote a new bootsector.

Launched windows and now I get: NTDLR is missing
 
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Then you'll have to slave the drive to another system and backup any data you need and do a fresh install. As the install cd doesn't recognize a previous windows installation because of all the errors.
 
johnb35 said:
Then you'll have to slave the drive to another system and backup any data you need and do a fresh install. As the install cd doesn't recognize a previous windows installation because of all the errors.
Click to expand...

Arghhh, I locked up windows during the install on new hard drive - now I can't recover! Fatal error preventing setup from continuing.

Help!
 
johnb35 said:
Please explain exactly what happened.
Click to expand...

Ok, now I have a new hard drive installed with XP home loaded fresh.

I have the new drive connected same as the old and it works fine. I tried to connect the flaky unit as a slave using the spare plug and a sata cable back to the motherboard, but the machine won't recognize (it the slaved drive).

Do I need jumpers?
 
If both are sata then there is no jumpers involved. If the bios won't detect the old drive then the drive is bad. If bios detects it but windows doesn't then you may have to go into disk management and see if a drive letter was assigned to it.
 
johnb35 said:
If both are sata then there is no jumpers involved. If the bios won't detect the old drive then the drive is bad. If bios detects it but windows doesn't then you may have to go into disk management and see if a drive letter was assigned to it.
Click to expand...

Alright, I set BIOS to recognize drive and now Windows sees it too. It shows as full with no space available. When I try to explore it, there is only one file called $$TEMP$$
 
If you have data on that drive that you need I would download some data recovery software and see if it can be retrieved. If not, you may have just lost the data for good. You may have to take the drive to a computer repair place and see if they can get it working for you.
 
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