Hi everyone.
My computer recently just crashed a few times, but restarts always helped.
This time restarting froze at the splash screen so I started in safe mode. Windows Recommended to start System Recovery, so I went along with it and tried to back-up the system to a previous restore point.
About half way done, the system just froze for hours. So I restarted, this time I get the message UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME.
I restarted in recovery console through winxp boot CD and did a chkdsk /p, /r etc. Always froze at 3% so I restarted and read around the net. At this time when I typed "dir" in the recovery console, my hard drive was still intact and it could see all of my files.
I read around the internet and people told me to do "fixboot C:" in recovery console. I did that and it said master boot record was corrupted, but it fixed it and said it was properly fixed (Don't know how it said it exactly).
So I typed "exit" and restarted the computer.
Now I get the message "NTLDR is missing press any key to continue". So I try to replace ntldr and the other file from the recovery console and it gave me the message "Access is denied"... I type "dir" again and it reports my HD as having only 10MB!. This is a 200GB drive with over 150GB of data. I took the HD out and setup as a slave in another windows XP computer and everything boots up fine but now the slave drive detected only 10MB as recovery console did in the original computer. And some weird name files with boxes and weird symbols as file names.
Now I'm at a dead end. I tried Western Digital's Data life guard tools, nothing worked. I'm sure my data is still on the hard drive somewhere and that fixboot messed up everything from seeing anything on the HD. How can I get access back to my data?
There is over 9 years of work and memories on the hard drive, this PC was used as the backup while I was restoring other computers. Now I can't get to the files that I need, documents, vacation pictures, anything...
Will someone please give me an effective way to get my data back behind this 10MB thing that keep comming up no matter which computer I put it on?
Maximum point amount is 500, but I think this is a question that can't be rated by points. I will give a significant larger number of expert points.
-Thank You
-John Liu.
