Dead MBR?

[cash_site]

Hi guys,

My cousin's HD is playing up. They had a power surge/failure and the system shutdown... when he went to start it up again, it wouldnt get past the first XP bootloading screen (green progress bar)... he tried safemode and it got stuck on one of the mwup.sys(?) files...

I got him to boot up with Hiren's 8.8 and try the DOS NTFS file managers. It can see the main HD (its partitioned into c:\100GB(NTFS) and d:\20GB(FAT32))... but it only shows c:\ being the 20gb FAT !

Next i tried Partition Commander, it shows the full 120GB split into the two partitions. But when he 'explores partition' it doesnt find the files inside. But for the 20gb partition it finds all files.

So, where do we go from here? Is it the MBR or perhaps Partition tables? Is there any app to access inside the dead partition? We just need a few files, at least copying the files from the 100GB partition to the 20GB one is good enough!!

Any ideas or work arounds are great appreciated.

Cheers

[thraxed]

Most dos apps will not read ntfs drives. If you know the ntfs partition not encrypted, ya could try booting with linux that runs off of cd like ubuntu. Bring up a shell and mount the drives if it doesn't auto find it, and ya should be good to go.

Or grab an old hd install xp/2000 use it as the master drive and see if it can access the drive.

[phishhead]

boot to the recovery console and try a fixboot command.

[FastGame]

boot to the recovery console and try a fixboot command.
yep try that :)

Most dos apps will not read ntfs drives. If you know the ntfs partition not encrypted, ya could try booting with linux that runs off of cd like ubuntu. Bring up a shell and mount the drives if it doesn't auto find it, and ya should be good to go.

Or grab an old hd install xp/2000 use it as the master drive and see if it can access the drive.
Yeah, you have your PCLinuxOS Live CD, put it to work ;)

[rik]

or Knoppix. It reads both FAT and NTFS just fine and mounts those drives and partitions at boot.

[FastGame]

And like Curio reminded us before :D don't forget BartCD ;)

[cash_site]

Hey guys... thanks for the quick responses... my cousin was starting to get really stressed out.. it is TAX time here for his own business, and all his receipts and information is on the drive... (backup strategy??)...

Any, I have sent him on the tasks you guys have listed (THANNKS HEAPS)... so hopefully it works. The DOS file managers didnt work, they did detect that it was NTFS and had data (i.e. 20gb used, etc).. but no access....

The next thing was to take the drive out and put it in a USB case for laptop or mount in another working PC... If that fails, i NOW do have the PCLinuxOS LiveCD... i'm almost hoping the other ideas dont work, so i can test the LiveCD out!

The highest priority is to get the data, then i'll spend some time on trying to fix the booting... what is the difference between the XP recovery /fixboot and /MBR ??

I'll keep you'll posted :D