Attempting to make HDD bootable again Windows 10 Professional

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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ValD
Posts: 1
Joined: 31 Mar 2021, 21:40

Attempting to make HDD bootable again Windows 10 Professional

#1 Post by ValD »

Hello,

I had a blue screen and after that my hard drive partition table has been damaged/corrupted (at least this is what I imagine happened). The system became non bootable and the Windows installation can no longer be found by things like bootrec, etc.

Unfortunately I had not taken any backups/images before I started doing things with TestDisk. I did not know what partition type it was as the first time running there was no auto detect so I went with Intel and it found a couple of partitions, none of them, however, were listing any of my files/folders so not knowing better I recovered them (made them Primary) and wrote the structure to disk. It did not help things as much as I hoped for and by some 'coincidence' I have missed my opportunity to reinstall Windows from RE and keep my files as I recall that option was present once.

The next round I decided to try and select another partition type (not Intel but EFI/GPT) and after doing a deep scan it found a ton more deleted partitions, the prompts told me that some (it gave a list) can not be recovered but showed a lot more of deleted ones nonetheless. Some of the deleted ones were actually EFI Bootsector Partitions and a lot of them were Linux ones and a couple of Mac ones, but again, after checking the entire list I did not see any that had my files.

I recovered the EFI ones at least the ones that looked like they made sense and while that did not do anything I was able to see them show up in the Diskpart. During these attempts my hard drive was either RAW or NTFS or even FAT type but nothing really showed me any files I was hoping to recover.

Rebuilding Bootsector, MFT, to try and make it bootable did not yield any results either. I am not posting any logs currently because my hard drive is in the laptop with chkdsk running from the bootable usb where the log file is and it is quite slow at the moment but I can do it later if anyone thinks it will be beneficial.

To state my current goal just to be clear: ideally, I would like to see if I can make it bootable again, fix partition table, mbr, whatever needs fixing if it is possible, second goal is to recover data if it is still possible considering I did a couple of writes already. Since I did not see my files I do not know if I made something worse or nothing really changed.

Thank you in advance for your time and understanding.

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