Can I recover drive geometry and MBR

[bobheist]

I'm hoping to recover a hard drive messed up by a mate of a wayward offspring. I bought identical machines for both her and me, knowing there would be problems and hoping that we could get over some problems by looking at identical systems. Problem started when mate tried to mess with BIOS to get better performance. His report was the mouse went bad, but I found the machine would boot to diskette and had no MBR, but data on disk still good and accessable. I said I would bring some backup and copy files but before that happened, his "EXPERT" brother ran something from SuperFDISK that clobbered the drive geometry. Below is the report I get now from FDISK and SFDISK. I've never worked with anything down to this low level of hard drive problem and don't know where to start. Could someone help me with a good tool or writeup on how to beging recovery? Any guesses about if the Granddaughter photos that were still on the drive before the SuperFDISK running could still be recovered? Although the machine is 2000 miles away, I now have the hard drive and the like configured machine in my hands for testing and repair.

BAD DRIVE
CYL 2442384
HEAD 16
SEC 2


PART ACTIVE SYSTEM LABEL START SPACE(MB)
C H S
NO FREE] 1 1 1 37173
1 NO HIDDEN/FAT32 IBM_SERVICE 2379126 0 1 988
NO FREE} 2442382 0 1 0



WORKING DRIVE ON ANOTHER MACHINE -
BAD DRIVE WOULD HAVE LOOKED LIKE THIS BEFORE THEY BROKE IT

CYL 4865
HEAD 255
SEC 63

PART ACTIVE SYSTEM LABEL START SPACE(MB)
C H S
1 YES HPFS/NTFS IBM _PRELOAD 0 1 1 37173
NO HIDDEN/FAT32 IBM_SERVICE 4793 0 1 988

 

[wolluf]

I'd try a data recovery app like GetDataBack (lots of good ones available - just google - there are free ones, but they don't tend to work as well).

Then assuming you recover the data, just wipe the drive and start again (you might need something like killdisk or drive manufacturer's utility to write binary zeroes before repartitioning it - or XP's (if you're using XP) install partitioning tools may be sufficient.

 

[edfair]

You could try fdisk /mbr . It rewrites the MBR without touching anything else.

And if you are really brave you could look at the boot record on your drive and get the code and modify the killdisk utility to write the code into the boot sector of the bad drive.

It has been a long time since I've done it and I don't know if it is still as easy to do it.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[frankjo]

Hi,

And also, you could try to use Power Data Recovery to recover your data. (

http://www.PowerDataRecovery.com)

Hope this help.

 

[wahnula]

Don't forget about our old friend SpinRite...

http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm

The Swiss-army-knife of HDD utilities.