A program crash last week in XP scrambled the registry making it necessary for me to pull one of the mirrored drives on my main computer.

I was able to reboot off a boot disk and repair the damage, but when I reinstalled the second drive (to rebuild the array) and rebooted the machine it wiped out the MBR of both drives.

Can anyone point out a good data recovery program? I tried R-Studio software using two different platforms but it just crashes after scanning about 20%

If I could rebuild the MBR, I'd be gold or a program that would scan and move the files. I have 10 years worth of files I'd like to get back.

No more mirrored crap for me, this is the second time this happend! Dual external is how I'm going next.

Been offline for more than a week due to this, hate using the laptop with the tiny keyboard if anyone was looking to contact me. I have an older box up and running now but really need to get the main PC back up. Lots going on here non-computer related! I'll post pictures when I get a few minutes of time.

Gary

use a 3th harddrive?

install wndows on it and copy all the data on it

exxe wrote on 23.08.08 at 14:35:39:

use a 3th harddrive? install wndows on it and copy all the data on it

There is no Master Boot Record- As far as Windows is concened the drive is blank and unformatted.

Already tried popping it into another machine, with no MBR.. there is nothing for Windows to see.

IDE or S-ATA drive?

you can try Knoppix linux and look it is see the drive

I have a favourite Data Recovery program that hasn't failed me yet, it's called: Ontrack Easy Recovery Pro

I'm partial to Seagate and that's what Seagate recommends.  ;)

exxe wrote on 23.08.08 at 15:59:54:

IDE or S-ATA drive? you can try Knoppix linux and look it is see the drive

Seagate S-ATA

I considered booting up a Linux box but will leave that as a last resort.

razrx wrote on 23.08.08 at 16:13:11:

I have a favourite Data Recovery program that hasn't failed me yet, it's called: Ontrack Easy Recovery Pro

I might give that a go later today, I just might have a copy that came with one of my drives.

I also have Spinrite 6.0 I'm going to try later today.

Ohhh yeah!  I forgot about Spinrite!  I've seen Leo Laporte have the guy that wrote Spinrite on his TV show Call for Help and The Lab With Leo Laporte.

Good call.   8-)

knoppix is a live dvd
boot without installation

No good on SpinRite.

I had a similar issue with my SATA raid AAAAAAGES ago... ::)

Now I swear by testdisk:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

FULLY rebuilds MBR. 8-)

Best of all? :-? IT'S FREE! :D

For those of you without a floppy drive, go get THIS Linux Live-CD. ;)

Parted Magic (includes testdisk for linux):

http://partedmagic.com/wiki/PartedMagic.php?n=PartedMagic.Downloads

Also the BEST tool for re-partitioning PERIOD! 8-)

Allowed me to re-partition a completely fuxored WD SCSI HDD that I use in my old 486 machine (the partition was unreadable to practically everything - except this!) :D

can`t you just do a repair install of xp on one of the drives to repair the mbr

An XP "repair install" doesn't work if the MBR is toast - testdisk does! ;)

fdisk /mbr

perhaps this is what you are looking for  :-?

edit: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/69013/EN-US/

For cases like that I repeatedly had excellent results with "Stellar Phoenix" Data Recovery.

Only small caviat is, that you need to install it onto a working Windows machine and then attach the troubled Drives to it (works on USB Drives as well, however, so you don't have to attach the Drive to the Board's Controller if you got an external USB Case available)

Generally, I would avoid writing data to the troubled disks at all cost, it only makes things worse.
A missing MBR should not affect Partitions, it just prevents the Disk from being used as a Boot device. Therefor I think, the Partition table got scrambled (that's actually a frequent cause of data loss in the mass of defects, I recently fully revived such a Disk within Seconds using the above Recovery Tool)

gtxe wrote on 24.08.08 at 16:14:05:

fdisk /mbr perhaps this is what you are looking for  :-? edit: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/69013/EN-US/

No dice.

RAID setup remember?

EDR Commander can see the partitions, repairing the MBR made no difference.

To be safe I ordered a new PATA hard drive, when it comes in I'll Fdisk it and format and use EDR to copy the partitions over to the new drive.

Once I make sure my data is secure I'll blow away the original drives and reinstall XP. I'm not going to run the RAID setup again, I'll just go to external storage with automatic backup.

if repair install won`t work

install another copy of windows side by side on the same disk different directory or in the same directory replacing the original install
it will boot and the data will be intact

IG88 wrote on 25.08.08 at 11:42:27:

if repair install won`t work install another copy of windows side by side on the same disk different directory or in the same directory replacing the original install it will boot and the data will be intact

Making writes to a disk where you are trying to recover data is a real bad idea if you want your data back.

Very easy to lose eveything.

I'd perfer to play it safe, over 10 years of assorted files plus other critical personal data at stake.

personally never had a problem doing that

unless drive faulty or partitions are corrupted

alot of those MBR tools don`t do much good , tried alot of them

yeah safer using a good recovery program

When you fixed the mbr at the recovery console, did you also run "fixboot"?  I nuked the mbr on my Vista partition when I was messing around with installing OSX.  I had to run both "fixmbr" and "fixboot" to get everything working again.  It might be worth a shot if you haven't tried it yet.

gdonovan wrote on 25.08.08 at 03:48:14:

... RAID setup remember?

In mirrored RAID each drive should be the same as a single drive.
But I might be wrong.

As FalconFly pointed out it's probably not the MBR. If it really was there would not be such a huge problem at all.

I would recommend imaging the disk first before you use recovery tools on it. Recovery tools can fix it, but can also cause more damage. Better is to use the 'dd' command (Google for 'dd', if you're not experienced with Linux be care full and read it twice) in Linux and make a 1:1 copy of the disk to a spare drive. Use the spare drive to try recovery programs. If you or the program screw up you can always create a new copy from the original disk :).

The two programs I use for data recovery is EZ recovery which was mentioned before and Active Un-delete which helped me recover files from a software Raid-5 setup. Ontracks EZ recovery should work ok I would think. I've only got Ver 6 but PM me if you want to try it out.

Good luck

Jand

@Gary - did you try testdisk? :-?

paulpsomiadis wrote on 27.08.08 at 00:38:50:

@Gary - did you try testdisk? :-?

I did not try that.

ERD Commander was able to locate the partitions so I'm content to wait for the new drive to come in before proceeding. If ERD copies everything over to the new drive and I can access the files then all will be good (I can always reload XP, no big woop)

If it doesn't work with either mirrored drive then I'll try something else.

testdisk should be able to fully rebuild the MBR. ;)

Best thing would be to wait till you have a backup of the partitions "just in case" - then give testdisk a go. :)

Quote:

ERD Commander was able to locate the partitions so I'm content to wait for the new drive to come in before proceeding. If ERD copies everything over to the new drive and I can access the files then all will be good (I can always reload XP, no big woop)

Sound promising.. Good Luck my Friend.

Looks like ERD commander is doing it's thing- I installed and formatted an IDE drive and the program is moving my files over!

I can clearly see the file directorys and names as they are copied over, life is good.

SUCCESS!!!!!!!

Congratz!! :)

Glad you got it sorted! 8-)