Help please, virus just deleted my C:\ drive

Nate--IRL--

Nate--IRL--

Nate--IRL--

Soldato
Joined
20 Jul 2004
Posts
3,646
Location
Dublin, Ireland
Long story short i got hit by a virus that seems to have deleted my C:\ drives Fat table or partition table or Master boot record not sure which, i am currently using a ubuntu 6 live cd to use the computer for net access.

Now then, before i reformat the drive and lose pretty much every thing i had, do i have any options available to me, to attempt to restore the drive, or just even to salvage some stuff from it?

Fixing the partitiion table would seem a priority (if possible)

Anybody know where I'd start?

Nate
 
if you do reinstall for the love of god partition your hard drive, I only have 8Gb for XP then my other partitions separate, one for downloads/files one for program files and one for media :)

what error does xp bring up or the bios when you try and boot from your hdd?
 
VaderDSL said:
if you do reinstall for the love of god partition your hard drive, I only have 8Gb for XP then my other partitions separate, one for downloads/files one for program files and one for media :)

what error does xp bring up or the bios when you try and boot from your hdd?
Click to expand...

Yeah hindsight and all that......... :)

Basically it says no system disk, looking at it in the disk partitioner in Ubuntu, it says there are no valid partitions on the disk.......so the partition table ist Kaput for sure. I feel that this is pretty much unfixable, but i would like more opinions from the clever people here first :)

Nate
 
not sure if i fall in the clever camp or not but your data may still be there if you havent written over anything or tried to format the drive etc

i cant remember the name but there are useful cds that are bootable that have all kinds of utils on there from partitioning software to AV software.

might be able to find the partition and recover your data? :o
 
just repair the mbr using xp recovery tool. use the commands fixboot ficmbr, if that does not work reformat/reinstall. One problem might be that if you do have a boot sector virus, you may need to run a low level format on your hdd as even a reinstall of xp will not remove it
 
Your data is most likely recoverable. Unless the virus zeroed your entire drive (quite unlikely) I would Google or use some of the software linked on here that scans the drive for data. Even after a format data can be recovered using these tools. don't do anything to your drive (format, install xp) it will write over your data.
 
Get Data Back for NTFS

Download a nifty little tool called 'Get Data Back for NTFS'. This will be able to retrieve your data. It does not rely on any partition information to be written on the disk, it will physically scan for your data and show you what can be recovered. Just don't WRITE anything to the disk.

Get an old 2/3GB HDD, install XP, plug in your old drive as a secondary device, and run Get Data Back for NTFS. It will scan your secondary disk then you can recover whatever you need. You'll probably need an additional disk to recover the data to.

Hope this helps.
 
Thanks all for your help, i had a go with multiple programs and boot cds, but i couldn't find one that was freeware allowing Partition table restores, that and time constraints lead me to starting from scratch again.

Probably for the best anyhow, i didn't lose anything too vital (3 other Harddrives were unaffected), and the xp install was over 3 years old anyway.

However I have taken VaderDSL's advice and have created a 4gb partition just for windows to allow for easy imagemaking.

Thanks all.

Oh btw the virus, or whatever it was, went unnoticed by my Virus software.

Nate
 
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