The Case of the Unbootable Hardrive and the Frustrated Tech

Using TestDisk to repair the filesystem
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WhiskeyHammer
Posts: 1
Joined: 11 Jan 2013, 02:20

The Case of the Unbootable Hardrive and the Frustrated Tech

#1 Post by WhiskeyHammer »

Im fixing a laptop for a friend of mine since shes incapable of figuring it out herself and doesnt have the money for the full on geek squad deal. Basically it wont boot. So I rip out the hard drive and frankenstein it into a spare external enclosure I have lying around. I take a look at the partitions using the standard Windows Disk Manager and it has three partitions, Backup, G:, and F: where G: is RAW and the others are NTFS.

I do some research and find TestDisk as well as the step-by-step and some forum posts with similar problems. I then promptly find that Im out of my depth. The Analyze options shows 3-4 partitions whereas the Quick Search option shows only two (and the sizes of those two partitions correlate to the backup partition and a combined G: and F:) and the deep search options stops running at 4%.

What else do you need from me in order to diagnose the problem?
If the below is sufficient what is my next move? I saw a forum post that described how to replace the boot sector with its backup but I dont trust my technical knowledge enough to mess with the advanced options yet.

Screen shots and other supporting data below:

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Pressing P while highlighting the bottom partion takes me to a screen that says something is wrong with the drive and it cant be read. When selecting between the two partitions, the top one shows up as being 10gb and the bottom one shows up as being 240gb.
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