Invalid operating system

Discussion in 'PC hardware help' started by moxy123, Mar 25, 2006.

  1. moxy123

    moxy123 Guest

    Hello everybody,
    I am faced with a very critical problem. I will be so thankful to anyone who can solve my problem. I use windows XP professional on a 40 GB western Digital HDD. I was trying to use a program called "roadkils image writer". The software asked me the location to write the image file and it gave me the options as "HDD 0" and "HDD 1". I selected HDD 0 and it was in the process of writing to the HDD 0 when I stopped it in between. Suddenly the computer rebooted and gave me a message as "Invalid Operating System". When i booted it through BOOTIT NG partitioning software, I was shocked to see that the full capacity of the harddisk was shown as a unpartitioned space. I have got my important photographs in my drive. Can anyone tell me how to go ahead?

    Regards.
     
  2. philraz

    philraz Regular member

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    are you sure that is the exact error message after many years of repairing pcs I've never encountered that error message dont panic yet I dont think bootit can see ntfs drives
     
    Last edited: Mar 26, 2006
  3. moxy123

    moxy123 Guest

    Thanks for replying. That was exactly the message i got. I think the MBR might have been overwritten and the links to the sector was lost.
     
  4. BigDK

    BigDK Regular member

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    If you can't repair the drive, I would use another drive to load to, then put the old drive in and use a data recovery application to retreive your photos and any other data.
     
  5. kathe

    kathe Member

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    Last edited: Mar 30, 2006
  6. philraz

    philraz Regular member

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    first run a virus scan from a boot cd I recommend UBCD from here
    http://ubcd.sourceforge.net/download.html
    it also has alot of usefull tools included run fprot thats the antivirus if no viruses are found
    boot with your windows xp cd when it gets to the press enter to install windows push r on your keyboard to start the repair console
    run the following commands
    fixboot
    fixmbr
    hitting enter after each command
     

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