Bad Disk

Matt-Page · 19 Sep 2007 at 08:18

Scenario:

Laptop starts up, loads XP loader, then blue screens. (Not good).

Tried recovery console, did bootcfg, fixmbr, etc. No change. (could have running those commands broken anything?)
chkdsk reports one or more un-recoverable errors.

Rebooted and NTLDR is missing / corrupt. Copy file to disk (isk retained data after reboot so it is reading / writing) but still wont boot. Diskpart shows disk as a FAT-16 partition with only 7MB free.

Removed drive from laptop, and plugged into USB caddy, both partitions load, but primary one only shows NTLDR on disk, and partition as FAT-16. Tried to convert partiton using Windows utility, fails due to lack of space

Tried it in Partition Magic, NTFS is NOT available from list to convert to

chkdsk reported errors, but it fixed them, probably not good.

Tried numerous data recovery programs, couple of paid for ones, and Demo ones which let you preview the files if it find them. GetDataBack scanned the drive, but stopped a fair few times on back sectors, but i could see it was finding Winword6/MP3's/BMP's/JPG's. When the search finished, it loaded a blank results window, and the 'File Explorer' wasn't available.

So i'm stuck, i guess the disk has bad sectors but the person really needs the data back. Any suggestions? If I'm fighting a loosing battle, please tell me i'm waisting my time so i don't continue to wreck my head over this.

ByteJuggler · 19 Sep 2007 at 11:29

Unfortunately I suspect all your attempts at fixing the filesystem on the apparently physically broken disk might've made matters worse. (Particularly, I would not try to convert partition types on a broken disk as that involves lots of reading and writing which will mean more data corruption if done on the broken disk...)

The first thing to do when you've got a disk with physical problems is attempt to take a bit for bit binary image of the entire disk, onto another known working one (or ideally, take 2 images.) Then only do you attempt to repair the logical filesystem damage on the working disk, and if you screw up, you can try again by copying/restoring the image from the second copy again. One very useful rescue/recovery disk I tend to use in these types of jobs is TRK However be warned, it's not a point and click tool. You'll need to have the willingness to learn and be slightly technically minded to go down that road. (I'll try and help if you want to try that.)

How big is the laptop drive? Have you got another disk that one could clone the laptop drive to? (Such a drive ideally should not contain anything you want to keep, to keep things simple.)

Matt-Page · 19 Sep 2007 at 13:33

Unfortunately i don't posess a HDD i can use. I have seen this "Clone" option in some of the freeware tools i have obtained.

The disk in question is about 30Gig i think!

Any idea how else i could go about this? Could i have caused damage by doing bootcfg and fixmbr, as before i did this, the XP screen was loading, but not going any further, after that it came up with NTLDR not found.

Should i give up?

ByteJuggler · 19 Sep 2007 at 15:57

Matt-Page said:
Unfortunately i don't posess a HDD i can use. I have seen this "Clone" option in some of the freeware tools i have obtained.

The disk in question is about 30Gig i think!

Any idea how else i could go about this? Could i have caused damage by doing bootcfg and fixmbr, as before i did this, the XP screen was loading, but not going any further, after that it came up with NTLDR not found.

Should i give up?

bootcfg, fixmbr and friends don't do much although they might've not made matters better either depending on where the drive is having difficulties. In any case their changes are fairly localised and irrelevant to just getting data off a disk. (E.g. FixMBR rewrites the master boot record which is one sector only etc as you no doubt know.)

Whether you should give up is up to you and how much trouble you want to go to. 30GB is fortunately not that large. The cheapest desktop drives is about £25 inclusive for 80GB so an option (if you're prepared to spend £25 in the attempt) would be to buy one of these as a scratch/backup disk to work from. Alternatively, if you can resize one of the partitions on one of your existing desktop disks, so that you can free up 30GB of empty space, then in principle you can potentially use that to image the laptop drive to as well, thus removing the need for another disk. However, I would be careful about going that route since you're then obviously endangering your own data/partitions by subjecting them to resizing and to low level recovery tools, which if used improperly can easily be used to accidentally delete your own data as well. At a minimum, if you want to go down that route, I would then recommend that you take a full system (bare metal) backup on your desktop rig (and verify it), to be safe so you can restore that in the case of catastrophe.

All that said, it's also kind of hard to guess at a prognosis presently, so... :confused: