Partition Problem

[Cheesus]

So my wife wakes me up this morning in a panic, "My laptop won't boot!". I act extremely concerned and check out her laptop, it's sitting at a non-system disk error. I remove the SD media card that's in the card reader on the front and reboot thinking 'piece of cake'. Well it turned out to be a piece of something...

Still get the non-system disk error. I go ahead and reset the BIOS settings and clear CMOS, still same thing. I can go into the BIOS and see the hard disk and whatever hard disk utility that Compaq provided scans the drive and doesn't see any problems. I then tried booting to an XP cd and tried to run the recovery console. Almost immediately it boots me out to a DOS looking prompt saying that there's no C: drive. I try changing drives and the only one I can access is the CD-Rom drive, D:.

I then try booting to the XP CD again and this time acted like I was going to do an install. Get to the partition screen and all 40GB is showing unpartitioned space.

WTF just happened?? Are there any options for partition recovery?

[{OOE}Death]

Partition magic may be of some use. Do you have a copy around some where?

[Cheesus]

I don't have that particular program but I've found some others online that might work. I'll see if I can find that.

[D-Bone]

Agreed, Partition Magic would be a good start, see if it also shows it unpartitoned or damaged or what. I assume there is important data on the drive, it may be worth while to pull the HDD out and hook it up to your desktop using a laptop hard drive adapter. Then you could run recovery tools on the drive if needed. Also, if you can find out who makes the drive, there are specific diag tools for each drive. That may also help determine if the drive itself is still good.

[D-Bone]

Some links for Hard drive specific diagnostics:

Seagate Drives
Seatools: http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/

IBM/Hitachi Drives:
Drive Fitness Test: http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

Maxtor Drives:
Powermax: http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/powermax.htm

Fujitsu Drives:
Fujitsu Diagnostics: http://www.fcpa.com/support/hard-drives/software_utilities.html

Western Digital Drives:
Data Lifegaurd: http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp?cxml=n&swid=3

[Cheesus]

Alright, thanks guys, I'll give it a whirl.

[D-Bone]

Also, check your private messages, I just sent you some "special" links for data recovery tools.

[D-Bone]

Also, do you need Partition Magic? I have a "copy" you could "borrow" for "educational purposes" if needed... ;)


EDIT: nevermind, link sent anyway...

[Cheesus]

Thanks for letting me 'borrow' your 'copy', I will 'evaluate' it later. :lol:

[Cheesus]

Good news, got it back up and running. I ended up using a program called 'Active Partition Recovery' (www.partition-recovery.com) and then was able to repair the MBR through XP recovery console.
:lol:

[D-Bone]

Excellent!