Soldato
- Joined
- 4 Aug 2007
- Posts
- 22,003
- Location
- Wilds of suffolk
Someone asked me to look at a laptop that wasnt booting. This had been into a shop for a repair and basically wouldnt boot when returned, the power supply had been fixed appareantly but the system wasnt booting.
I tried all the obvious but couldnt get it to work, interestingly a test from the BIOS reported the HDD was ok so I figured the guy had borked something on the motherboard so get a 2.5" PATA caddy, remove the HDD and plop it in there to allow file recovery, thats all they are after basically. They will ditch the old laptop etc once they get their photos back. Its always photos isnt it
Now thats not worked, my windows isnt detecting the HDD in the caddy, yet some recovery type software etc will see it, but mis report the size of the disk, guess this is the caddy misreporting or something.
Its appearing like the boot sector and possibly the FAT table is buggered (machine was an XP OS).
So I am looking for options, is a low level file recovery likely to work, or is there anything clever that may rebuild a partition, or force a new full partition. Then is the FAT table rebuildable from scratch.
If anyone can recommend some recovery software then that would be great.
Or is it simply screwed?
Really after some useful tips if anyone has faced similar, there seems to be data on the disc but I tried to recover a few .txt files and they showed garbage.
I tried all the obvious but couldnt get it to work, interestingly a test from the BIOS reported the HDD was ok so I figured the guy had borked something on the motherboard so get a 2.5" PATA caddy, remove the HDD and plop it in there to allow file recovery, thats all they are after basically. They will ditch the old laptop etc once they get their photos back. Its always photos isnt it

Now thats not worked, my windows isnt detecting the HDD in the caddy, yet some recovery type software etc will see it, but mis report the size of the disk, guess this is the caddy misreporting or something.
Its appearing like the boot sector and possibly the FAT table is buggered (machine was an XP OS).
So I am looking for options, is a low level file recovery likely to work, or is there anything clever that may rebuild a partition, or force a new full partition. Then is the FAT table rebuildable from scratch.
If anyone can recommend some recovery software then that would be great.
Or is it simply screwed?
Really after some useful tips if anyone has faced similar, there seems to be data on the disc but I tried to recover a few .txt files and they showed garbage.