I have two hard drives in my computer both have installs of windows xp. I decided to format one to get some gigs back, but it made the other one unbootable. I presume this is because the drive I didn't format had no boot.ini file. So I ran the windows recovery and did a fixboot and fixmbr but all that gave me was a NTLDR is missing. I have had that problem before so I just took out the drive, put it in mum's pc and copied ntldr and ntdetect onto the drive. Put it back in my pc and nothing happened. THEN I put it in mums pc again... and windows said I needed to format the drive before I could do anything to it!!!!! I understand that this means the drive has gone to RAW data because the allocation table is corrupted or something? Its an NTFS drive and I know allocation tables are associated with FAT but you get what I mean. So now my drive is unreadable. I've been collecting the data for 10 years, I need it back! What can I do? PLEASE help :'(
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download5301.html http://www.ontrack.com/freesoftware/ http://www.z-a-recovery.com/download.htm http://www.snapfiles.com/Freeware/system/fwdatarecovery.html http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/collection/collid,1295-order,1-c,downloads/files.html http://www.easeus.com/ http://www.ntfs.com/products.htm http://www.pcinspector.de/download.asp?language=1#file_recovery
You just googled RAW data recovery didn't you? Lol. That's what I did too. Most of the tools I downloaded that actually work are trial versions and I either can't recover the data at all (I can just look at it) or I can only recover a few folders at a time which is good if I have like 10 million hours to spare. Thanks for the help though I just took it down to my local PC shop see what they can do with it, but one of the scans I did showed that the partition data was still there, so I think there's still hope.
You might have to do a fixmbr/fixboot again to get the mbr back where it's suppose to be. Next download the demo of "paragon justboot corrector" and use that to boot up the computer, it'll check the registry on your non-booting hard drive. Sometimes when you make changes to a computer configuration the drive letters on your windows xp system drive will change. See what your system drive letter is, usually it's c:, unless it originally was something else. Something as simple as a wrong drive letter will give you a lot of problems. directions on changing drive letters. http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=174958 demo here http://www.justboot.us/boot_corrector.htm Your problem is fixable, I wouldn't format just yet.
no i didn't use google to search this list as i've had this list for a few years. also have used the 1st 2 & last 1 of the list. the 2nd 1 i actually have the program.
Yeah, I wasn't going to format that drive any time soon, photos and stuff that I can never get back would be lost. Not cool. ddp, thanks for the list I'll keep it safe somewhere. Atm it's in the hands of the shop people, wasn't going to do a DIY job on this one lol.
Same thing happened to me recently. I just got fed up, cut my losses and formatted. To Linux. Apparently, Windows is so self righteous that it can't even stand seeing another copy of Windows on your system... At least the Grub bootloader doesn't stomp all over other existing operating systems you have installed. Hopefully you can solve the problem, otherwise you've just learnt the hard way why it is a good idea to make frequent backups. Especially before playing around with hardware configurations.
Well, after many sleepless nights, and screaming lots, I GOT MY DATA BACK! For anyone who ever has data problems... Use Active@ Undelete. Works PERFECTLY. Cheers for all your help.
