Reading Windows

The MBR (Master Boot Record, I think) of my Xp Harddisc is damaged since I upgraded my System.

I tried to fix it using FIXMBR in the recovery console

Well, tells me "MBR Repaired succesfully"

hmm somehow it's lying to my, that dirty little FIXMBR

because my MBR is still damaged, at least Partition magic 7 tellsm me that the Fileformat of my Harddrive is "BADMBR" and I believe that's no newly invented filesystem :)

You know of any programm that REALLY fixes MBR or a way to format harddrive with new MBR without deleting Data (Partition Magic can't do)

cya Magic

"The wise have always said the same things, and fools have always done the opposite"-Schopenhauer

There is another command available from the Windows recovery console called FIXBOOT. I don't really know what's the difference between FIXMBR and FIXBOOT but sometimes one works while another doesn't.

Please be careful and read FIXBOOT /? before executing it.

'Yeah, That's what Jesus would do. Jesus would bomb Afghanistan. Yeah.' - snowlion

Fixboot fixes the Boot.ini entries, so that's not my problem.

My problem is that the Logical partition in the partition Table has been deleted from the Master Boot Record on my Xp drive and i don't know how ti fix it...well I found a Program that could do it...for a little bit more than 500$... Damn such stuff makes me angry

anyways, if one of you knows how to fix a Partition table, please, please let me know...

cya Magic

"The wise have always said the same things, and fools have always done the opposite"-Schopenhauer

This post was edited by Magicdead on Oct 04, 2003.

I found a Program that could do it...for a little bit more than 500$

This page lists about two million other tools for that job. Also ones for less than 500 bucks.

'Yeah, That's what Jesus would do. Jesus would bomb Afghanistan. Yeah.' - snowlion

Ok Thx a lot, I'll try that

cya Magic

"The wise have always said the same things, and fools have always done the opposite"-Schopenhauer

Well Master Boot Record seems to be Ok, at least Partition Magic tells me so

Now, partition magic gets 2 times an Error 1507. PM homepage says that's a "Bad file record signature ", meaning that there is a FILE: missing in front of a file

Further on it tells to run CHKDSK /F to fix this

Well my CHKDSK only has /R, and that one tells me something about unrecoverable error, after checking the drive for 1 Hour.

Mhh 1 Error goes, another one comes...this sucks.

Especially because I may access all folders on the drive, except the Documents and Settings with my personal stuff in it :(

anyways, hope you may help me

Cya Magic

"The wise have always said the same things, and fools have always done the opposite"-Schopenhauer

As long as you don't delete or create files on the damaged disk your data should still be recoverable. I would suggest salvaging all your personal data using one of these black voodoo data recovery tools and then sweeping the hard disk with a big magnet.

'Yeah, That's what Jesus would do. Jesus would bomb Afghanistan. Yeah.' - snowlion

Well, but If I may recover those 2 errors, I may turn the repaired NTFS drive into a Logical partition and then repair the Windows Installation.

would be better, and It would take hours to back up my Files...

cya Magic

"The wise have always said the same things, and fools have always done the opposite"-Schopenhauer

Well, but If I may recover those 2 errors, I may turn the repaired NTFS drive into a Logical partition and then repair the Windows Installation.

Yeah, but when chkdsk says "unrecoverable" it's usually talking of a surface error (i.e. defective sectors), so you shouldn't entrust that harddisk with important un-backuped data anyway.

Does said drive (and your BIOS) support SMART? (No, not that ugly car, that harddisk self-diagnosis system.) If yes, I recommend you check if the SMART diagnosis reports any problems. When a harddisk fails, the problems usually don't stop after just 2 faulty sectors.

"*sigh* Some men are really hard to manipulate!" - Orchid

Well, It think there is a Problem with the Harddisc Geometry, but I'm not sure.

As for now, I didn't find a Program that runs under Windows 98 and is able to recover my Documents and Settings folder on the Xp NTFS drive

I think it's better to format the drive and start over again, but I need my Documents and Settings folder

DAMN I may acces other files like the one with the stupid book I never read because it is so stupid, but I can't acces my Documents and Settings

God, Why me, why does it have to be me. Wasn't I always a loyal Atheist? Is that the way you say thanks for my years of unbelieve?

That's the problem with Atheist believe, you have no one to blame when something doesn't work the way it work

Anyways, cya Magic

"The wise have always said the same things, and fools have always done the opposite"-Schopenhauer

As for now, I didn't find a Program that runs under Windows 98 and is able to recover my Documents and Settings folder on the Xp NTFS drive

Have you tried any 3rd-party NTFS driver, like this or this?

If all else fails, you can still build your harddisk into a working NT/2k/XP machine and try to access your data from there.

"*sigh* Some men are really hard to manipulate!" - Orchid

I found exactly ONE program that did good, that's VirtualLab

It scanned through all Clusters and found all files, so I tried to save, when it told me that i need to buy quota, 119$ for 1 gb, 500 $ for 5 gb, to save files.

If a 3rd Party NTFS driver would do....

Almoust all recovery programs that read NTFS crash because they are made for XP

problem is that I have Error 1507 (reported by partition magic)
"Bad File record signature"
If it wasn't for those two 1507 errors, I could convert the partition into a Logical one, which would help, I could brose the files using PM and so on.

PM homepage tells to use chkdsk to fix those errors, but as written before, chkdsk didn't work

mhhh trying norton utilities, maybe that helps

cya Magic

"The wise have always said the same things, and fools have always done the opposite"-Schopenhauer

Mhh maybe you're hint helped me

because when looking around in my NTFS for Win 98 with read-only capabilities, i found NTFSCHK and when I run it, it resolves a lot of problems

Dude am I happy that it only has got read acces :(

now I have to get NTFSCHK to run in dos, what it would do If I had NT Boot Discs

Well I'll try to start it using the Windows XP recovery Console

cya later, Magic

"The wise have always said the same things, and fools have always done the opposite"-Schopenhauer

AFAIK, fixmbr only repairs the MBR's (boot) code, not the partition table itself.

I remember owning a copy of Dr. Solomon's Antivirus package, which came with a handy tool called cleanpar.exe ("par" as in "partition"). It built its own partition table by scanning one whole physical drive for blocks that contained valid boot sectors (or something), compared it with the actual MBR and constructed a new partition table. Unfortunately I can't seem to find this anymore, but you might be luckier than me.

If you have access to a disk editor like in Norton Utilities, you can also boot to DOS and search your drive for blocks (not clusters or files) with the hex bytes 55 AA at the end. If it looks like a boot sector (and contains some text like "IBM" or "DOS" or "FAT"), it's probably the first block of a partition.

Good luck!

"*sigh* Some men are really hard to manipulate!" - Orchid