Windows XP MBR corrupt

[snaveen]

Hi,

I had both windows XP and red-hat linux 7.3 on my laptop.
I was booting using grub. I got a new machine and installed linux on it so wanted to remove it from my laptop.

I removed the linux partitions with partition magic. Then I used windows XP cds to enter the recovery console and used fixmbr and fixboot to remove grub. Now I am not able to access my windows xp partition.

Chkdsk in recovery console gives the message "The volume appears to contain one
or more unrecoverable problems". I am not able to use bootcfg either.
I have not formatted the hard disk. If there any way I can recover my XP partition.

I saw some posts saying that I can use fdisk /mbr to restore the master boot record (although as a last resort), how can I get a fdisk to use with windows xp, the fdisk I got did not run on windows xp (message in recovery console: The command is not recognized).

Right now I am desperate and willing to try anything as I cannot afford to lose
the data on my XP partition.
Any help will be greatly appreciated

Thanks,
Naveen

 

[MontrealSoft]

Is this an NTFS partition?
If not, plug another hard disk, and use a win98 boot disk to access your XP data, then save it to the other disk.

MontrealSoft.com

http://www.montrealsoft.com

 

[wolluf]

Fdisk /mbr does the same as Fixmbr - just writes a new standard windows master boot record - doesn't update the partition table. Fixboot writes a new XP boot sector to whichever drive letter you specify (defaults to C: if none specified). Normally running Fixmbr & fixboot should not cause any problems - but I'm just wondering what effect your removal of Linux partitions using PM had. Using XP's disk management (run diskmgmt.msc) AFTER removing the Grub boot manager & making sure you could boot XP would be better (in hindsight of course!).

How was the laptop drive partitioned? (eg, was XP partition first partition on disk? If not, was it a primary partition? Was XP partition FAT32 or NTFS? How did partitioning change after PM - eg, after removing Linux did you expand XP to take up the free space created?)

You may need to load the laptop hard drive in an XP (or 2k) PC - you can get IDE adaptors to let you do this. Then you can try to access the partition. If still inaccessible normally, try a data recovery tool (free one here -

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm

- though it says its no good with NTFS if partition table damaged - which yours sounds like it might be. Try Google for commercial varieties - some recommendations on Tek-Tips if you search).

 

[snaveen]

Thanks for your answers.
My XP partition is NTFS. XP was the first partition on the disk. After removing the Linux partition, I created a new NTFS partition to take up the free space.
Yes, it looks my partition table is corrupted. Let me try the suggestion of hooking up my laptop harddrive to a pc and see if I can recover the data.

Naveen