Boot drive now "unallocated" 1

[goombawaho]

Got this 120GB Western Digital IDE hard drive from someone. It booted to Windows one week and the next time he fired it up, it wouldn't boot.

I ran the WD diagnostics on it and it passed the short test. When I booted into a BART PE CD, it couldn't see the C: drive.

When I took it home and attached it to a working XP machine, I can see the hard drive in Device Manager and Disk Managment. The whole droive shows as "Unallocated".

Is this a matter of recreating the MBR or is this time to send the drive out for recovery? I do own Partition Magic if this is of any help here.

 

[BadBigBen]

two things, either the MBR got whacked, or the Partition Table, or both...

first thing first, copy it sector for sector to another drive, e.g. DDRESCUE from a live LinuxCD (Parted Magic), or through Partition Magic (if it is supported)... that way DATA is intact...

then fix the MBR and see if it is recognized correctly...


at least that is what I would do, at this point....

Ben
"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.
Only ask questions with yes/no answers if you want "yes" or "no"

 

[goombawaho]

Okay - I just rolled the dice and did a FIXMBR from the XP recovery console and WHAM - back to normal. It boots and everything (data) is there.

Now the more important question - any hint as to why it might have lost the MBR - power supply going???

 

[BadBigBen]

It could be, could be that there was a power surge, could be cable...

I have never found any real cause, as to why the drives that had the MBR screwed up where whacked...

Ben
"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.
Only ask questions with yes/no answers if you want "yes" or "no"

 

[manhunter2826]

May I just ask what the exact/syntax command for FIXMBR is? Would the following be correct?
FIXMBR [IF YOU HAVE ONE DRIVE]

OR

FIXMBR C:\


Thanks.

 

[goombawaho]

Yeah - just booted the XP CD and chose the Recovery Console (not a repair installation).

And then from the command prompt FIXMBR if only the one hard drive. In fact, I would never dare to have more hard drives attached when doing this kind of thing. Too easy to make a major mistake if not concentrating.

Then you just ignore the warnings (at your peril potentially).

 

[manhunter2826]

Thanks goomb, I did try searching on Google for the correct syntax, but I was receiving conflicting info such as [device name] etc. But thank you, and have a lovely Xmas.

 

[goombawaho]

You really only need the syntax if you have multiple drives, but like I said - why add extra variables when you're doing something potentially damaging to a hard drive and nuke the wrong one.

 

[manhunter2826]

Once again, thanks for that goomb.

 

[goombawaho]

No problem. I had never had to run that myself until the other day, so it was freaking me out.

You start to wonder what's going on when a hard drive loses its MBR.