Damaged Partition Table

[cjr22]

Hi. A friend of mine has managed to stop his WinXP laptop from booting by corrupting the partition table of the hard disk. He wants me to try to recover whatever data I can from the hard disk. Can I just boot off a knoppix CD and use fdisk to re-write the partition table (it was all one big ntfs partition), then mount it and see what's left? Or will the act of re-writing the table itself cause the data on the hard disk to become more damaged/lost.

The data on the laptop isn't of any value, so he's not paying for data recovery software or companies.

 

[kylebubp]

You might wanna find a forensic version of Knoppix.

 

[Sunbird]

I just wanted to ask the same thing, well almost, my friend has managed to do the same to his 80GB seagate

Is there is windows based utility that would fix it?

Im trying to use a utility named testdisk, but its not very user friendly so i cant figure out how to use it.

Windows sees the drive but says it has no files system, while testdisk sees the ntfs, but I cant figure out how to fix the partition table.

Sorry for piggybacking on your thread.

 

[Smilin]

If you can get the drive mounted as a secondary in a Windows box and run diskprobe I can walk you through rebuilding the partition table by hand over the phone.

This would have to be in the evening hours, Eastern.

I'll PM you my contact info.


To answer your question though:
The act of rewriting the table will at worst blow away the boot sector(s). The backup boot sector should be enough to pull you back from that. It won't however, do anything to help you get your data back. Walking the disk from partition table to boot sector to MFT just simply won't work. With no clear link to the MFT you won't see data.

I would recommend you NOT really try any maintenance unless you know what you're doing. It's very easy to move this from a hassle to unrecoverable.

 

[Smilin]

Respond to that PM by emailing me here at work and I'll send you diskprobe.