cgsecurity.org

I had an external harddrive go bad and I was attempting a to fix it with testdisk. I wasn't paying attention, was a long day of driving, and I selected my operating systems OS, windows 7. Here's the sequence of events:

Selected [No Log]
Selected Proceed
Selected Intel
Selected Analyse
Selected Quick Search
Highlighted the OS's partition and hit enter to proceed
Selected Write (to write partition structure)

It then said I needed to restart for changes to take effect. I restarted and it booted right into some sort of hardware diagnostics program that, I'm assuming, was installed by Dell. It seems like the I really screwed stuff up...

Can I fix this? Is there a way to boot into a Live version of linux or something and restore that partition??? Please give me some good news....

Looks like that you forgot to set your OS-Partition as bootable.
Like it's described in this post;
http://forum.cgsecurity.org/phpBB3/post ... dell#p2580

Would it be possible to check and correct it?
If you have any further questions, please let me know.

Fiona

The problem is that I can't get into the OS, I can't run testdisk. It just goes right into some sort of hardware diagnostics thing. This is the main harddrive of the computer, not the external, so currently I have no OS working on that machine.

So I used a copy of CAINE (http://www.caine-live.net/), which is pretty awesome live linux version with a bunch of tools for fixing issues with booting into the main OS, and I got back to the testdisk utility. I followed the post's suggestions to set the dell utility partition to de, make it P for primary, and then set the OS as * for bootable. That made an error come up when I restarted BOOTMGR MISSING PRESS CTRL+ALT+DEL TO REBOOT.

Progress, but not working. I then searched online trying to figure out how to fix that issue. I had thought maybe I had damaged the bootmgr somehow. I burned a recovery disk with my other windows 7 computer, booted it up and of course, it wasn't compatible... So I found some commands to manually delete and rebuild the BOOTMGR. I ran the delete and rebuilt it. Still no go.

So I remembered there was a recovery partition when looking through testdisk. I decided, maybe that will boot into the recovery/repair menu I need. I set that as * for bootable and put the other two partitions, DellUtility and OS, to P for primary. I booted it up figuring to find the recovery options and to my surprise it booted right up into my OS. I was confused and overjoyed. I tested to make sure all the files and stuff could be accessed and it looks like it's all good!

Thanks for the help/suggestions. Hopefully this helps anyone else with this problem...

Thanks for your feedback!
I'll set your topic as solved.

best regards

Fiona