Hard drive diagnostic / repair?

January 14, 2005 2:45 PM

My WinXP system won't boot. Knoppix comes up fine, and complains that it can't read the partition table. I've got The Ultimate Boot CD; does anyone have a methodology for making things right, or at least recovering whatever I can from the hard drive?
posted by Daddio to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

You might (or might not, I don't know) find some of the diagnostic and data recovery tools on Hiren's Boot CD helpful. But you'll have to google for a working download.
posted by gd779 at 4:51 PM on January 14, 2005

Here is a direct link to the Hiren CD (zip) was originally posted by another MeFite awhile back in another AskMe thread.
posted by squeak at 5:42 PM on January 14, 2005

I've never had to do any partition rescues, but I did read this recently: knoppix rescue story using gpart to locate an XP partition.
posted by jjj606 at 7:57 AM on January 15, 2005

I'd try booting off the XP CD and picking the recovery console option when asked. Once in the console run a chkdsk and then a fixboot. If this won't allow you to boot the machine on the next reboot then boot with the XP CD again and act like your going to do a reinstall but install into a different folder. (instead of the Windows folder tell it to use Windows1 folder). Make sure you select to keep the existing partitions and don't format anything. If you can boot into the new install in the new folder you should be able to access all you old folders to save all the old data, you just won't have access to the applications that were originally installed.
posted by white_devil at 9:24 AM on January 15, 2005

That's some help. I'll give it a try and report back. Thanks.
posted by Daddio at 1:26 PM on January 15, 2005

I took the drive to a data recovery outfit, and they said that the heads wouldn't retract, so I doubt that there was any software solution that I could have tried. The manufacturer is sending me a replacement (still under warrantee), so this weekend I get to rebuild my system.
posted by Daddio at 6:22 PM on January 18, 2005