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Unknown Partition Type Windows XP

I have an urgent issue. Power failure corrupted my boot partition. I was originally getting a "boot, retry, ignore" error. Booted into the recovery console. Could not not see any files on the C:\ drive, so I ran a chkdsk /r. It got to 26% complete, and then I got an unrecognizable disk error. I booted up with ERD commander, and I can see the disk in disk manaager, but it says the partition is active and healthy, although it is an unknown type. I can't see any files on the disk, and explorer in ERD says the disk is 0 bytes. I have a lot of data that is not backed up on this partition. Any ideas/ help would be greatly appreciated!

sosinc3

You may need to use an FDISK /MBR command to reset the master boot record. I would also tell you that it may be good time to stop doing too much with the hard drive and look to a data recovery service such as ontrack data recovery. This is not something I would tell you to do on your own if you don't have the right set of software/hardware and/or experience as you may make matters worse and lose any chance of recovery. They offer a few options and here is a link to them: http://www.krollontrack.com/data-solutions-home/

Also, you could try this outfit as we have had good luck with them too: http://www.nationwidedatarecovery.com/?gclid=CJC9jcjexqMCFQNigwodmXIDvA

Thanks.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

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gcurtisgold

ASKER

Yes, I was definitely considering ontrack. If I attempt the FDISK /MBR and it doesn't work, will that make matters worse? I don't want to do something that makes it unrecoverable even for ontrack...

Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

LEAVE THE DISK ALONE!

Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

remote it, put it in a box, and send to Ontrack if you want a good chance of them recovering data at a price! Otherwise

1. Disk Internals Partition Recovery

or

2. iCare Data Recovery

these only scan and read, they do not make any chanes to the disk!

FDISK /MBR does!

Martin Kühn

Usually ontrack works very well. You can also try getdataback, which takes a lot of times but works also very well.

Willy Van den Houten

Check this site : http://www.acronis.com

Backup and recovery should help you a lot.

Try with the trial version first if you can see any data to recover.

gcurtisgold

ASKER

Thanks for the info hanccocka. I need to replace the PC anyway, so I went and got a new Dell from best buy. I will put the disk in that one and run the scans; otherwise it's off to ontrack..

BTW, got the dell home and it has a bad hard disk! go figure. I'm on my way back to best buy.

Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

yeah, my Dell has just had two disks go bad, a new disk arrived yesterday from Dell under warranty, and now the other disk has gone bad!

gcurtisgold

ASKER

The key was to put the disk into a working Windows PC. Chkdsk came up again on bootup. This time it went through all of the files, and recovered all of the "orphans," almost the complete disk and took about 2 hours. When complete, I lost only a few program files, and no data.