Methods of Data Recovery

More often than not, the cause of the apparent disk failure is due to a corrupt Master Boot Record (MBR) or Partition Table, which often results in a non-booting drive. The most common response to this is to panic and purchase a new drive, or even a new PC in some cases! Windows includes some very easy to use tools which can sometimes solve this problem, namely the very simplistic SCANDISK and CHKDSK. The former is used on DOS/3.1/95/98/ME whilst the latter is used on NT/XP systems. These applications can often be run from a bootable floppy disk or the Windows installation CD. These built in applications should be your first port of call unless you specifically know what the problem is. CHKDSK will find and fix most basic MBR problems if you run it directly from a boot disk. If one of your secondary hard drives has failed and you are still able to boot directly in to Windows XP, simply run "CHKDSK /F" from the run command. Usually Windows will automatically attempt to correct such problems without having to run this manually. If you cannot boot in to Windows XP, copy the CHKDSK file from another PC on to a bootable floppy disk and run it directly from there. You can also run CHKDSK from the Windows XP boot CD via the recovery console. A very common error which can often render a system unbootable is a "Missing NTLDR or NTDETECT" error. This can be fixed by inserting the Windows XP CD and selecting the Recovery Console. From here you will have to copy the working files from your CD-Rom drive over to your hard drive using the following commands: COPY X:i386NTLDR C: COPY X:i386NTDETECT.COM C: (where X is the letter of your CD-Rom drive) C:>copy x:i386ntldr c: Overwrite NTLDR? (Yes/No/All): y 1 file(s) copied. C:>copy x:i386ntdetect.com c: Overwrite NTDETECT.COM? (Yes/No/All): y 1 file(s) copied. The FIXBOOT and FIXMBR commands can repair the Bootsector and Master Boot Record, which can cause major problems when corrupt. These are very straight forward to run, and may need to be run after a particularly nasty virus infection. C:>fixboot /? Writes a new bootsector onto the system partition. FIXBOOT [drive:] Specifies the drive to which a boot sector will be written, overriding the default choice of the system boot partition. FIXBOOT is only supported on x86-based computers. C:>fixmbr /? Repairs the master boot record of the boot partition. FIXMBR [device-name] Optional name that specifies the device that needs a new MBR. If this is left blank then the boot device is used. If FIXMBR detects an invalid or non-standard partition table signature, it prompts you before rewriting the master boot record (MBR). FIXMBR is only supported on x86-based computers.