Master Boot Record Recovery - GDISK!!

[drewmich]

We accidentally ran GDisk - DOD Wipe - on one of our tech workstation's main WIN 98 drive while attempting the Wipe a secondary drive on the station.

We caught it before it made any real progress - 0% was still showing - maybe 30 seconds of runtime at the most.

I had it happen a couple of years ago and it basically wiped the Master Boot Record which we restored with - FDISK /MBR.

We tried that on this drive but when rebooting from the drive, we get the error message "MISSING OPERATING SYSTEM".

We are thinking of trying Norton Disk Doctor as recommended by Symantec on their support pages but I don't see what NDD could do to help.

Maybe GDisk got as far as wiping the Fat Tables????

Any help from some of you HD gurus ......

Andrew Roach
President - Drew Telecom Group, Inc.
Lucent/Avaya Voice Mail-Component-Transtalk Repair Specialists
Lucent/Avaya Telecom Brokers/Resellers
drew@triton.net
269-685-5400 - voice
269-685-5500 - fax

 

[Snickle]

Next thing to try is to boot to the Win98 floppy and type sys c:, that will at least make the hard drive bootable if it has not been damaged. fdisk /mbr replaces the Master Boot Record and every thing in it with a fresh copy.

 

[edfair]

You probably lost the FAT, but in 30 seconds you also got some of the critical operating system files.
You might want to use the emergency boot floppy and do a sys c: to reload an operating system on. It won't have the GUI but it will be an operating system to at least check the FAT and boot.
If they are good , you might try an overlay install from CD. It will put the critical GUI stuff back on without losing your programs or data. You will lose some links, but generally can get them back by reinstall.
In any case, good luck. It will probably be dicy.

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

 

[drewmich]

Thanks guys but ...

Sys C: won't work if the drive doesn't appear as a formatted drive.

This drive has lost both the MBR data and the FAT data. All or a majority of the remaining data should be there.

Again,

What I need to do is rebuild the MBR and FAT on this drive so that it can be recognized properly. It would be ideal to be able to get it to reboot into Windows 98 in its original state, but it probably won't. If we can get the drive's MBR & FAT rebuilt then we can reload WIN 98 and should be good to go.

Any further ideas? I have used a few of our restore and data recover tools, but without the FAT being rebuilt, they don't work. There are a couple other tools I am going to try.

Andrew Roach
President - Drew Telecom Group, Inc.
Lucent/Avaya Voice Mail-Component-Transtalk Repair Specialists
Lucent/Avaya Telecom Brokers/Resellers
drew@triton.net
269-685-5400 - voice
269-685-5500 - fax

 

[edfair]

There are a couple of packages out there that supposedly rebuild the FAT. Getdataback was one I've seen mentioned.

You might try a google search on rebuilding and see what shows up.


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