fixing my MBR assistance

[dgkney]

After reading some good reviews, I installed a trial of Diskkeeper to evaluate with thoughts of purchasing it. (something I will NOT do now).

After defragging one of my drives (one of 2 partitions on a 200 gig WD drive that is new and in good shape and was working FINE before the install) the drive went BAD! I cannot open any files on it -- pdfs, jpgs and tiffs. They all tell me that the file has become corrupt.

my thumbnails and previews of images are a muck -- the images also look like they've been put thru the washing machine or are at least experiencing some obscure test pattern filter.

Folders on that disk also appear to have been emptied! and a new folder called "found.ooo" was created with a bunch of .chk folders in it.

I think something went amiss when diskeeper was supposed to run and maybe screwed something up at boot time, but I can't be sure (really, I have no clue, but it's a semi-educated stab in the dark!).

I tried checkdsk -- and I also uninstalled diskkeeper (although from what I've read it may still be lurking in my system??)

I am thinking of trying to recover (?? fix??) my MBR ... I've never done it and am feeling more that a bit of trepidation at the thought ...

Can anyone offer advice/ideas ... prayers????

I have a good portion of that corrupt drive backed up, but OF COURSE a few files were just created last week (like our annual report!!) and they are not inaccessible -- and I NEED THEM!

win xp pro with sps and updates -- just clean installed on a NEW HD 2 weeks ago
p4 1.8
1 gig rdram

thanks!

deb

 

[dbData]

Recovering the MBR wouldn't make much difference at this stage. Once chkdsk or scandisk has run the damage is done. Unless you saved an undo file during chkdsk or scandisk, the data is pretty much hosed.

Diskeeper is still one of the best programs for defragmenting available.

For future reference, ALWAYS backup your data before installing new software or new hardware. Just incase something like this happens. Additionally, clean any disk errors prior to defragmentation.

To have shot at recovering the data. Stop using the drive! Create a sector-for-sector image of the disk to another drive. Using the "copy" of the original drive, wipe out both FAT's (FAT or FAT32) or zero the first 1000 sectors (NTFS). Install the drive as a secondary disk. Purchase and run R-Studio on the drive. If the data returned by R-Studio is corrupt, then the corruption is too severe for recovery.

More information can be found at

http://www.howtorecoverdata.com.

Good Luck!