Damaged MBR Partition Table prevents eeven Booting Boot CD's

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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Author
Rocket
Posts: 3
Joined: 25 Nov 2014, 13:28

Damaged MBR Partition Table prevents eeven Booting Boot CD's

#1 Post by Rocket »

Hi,


I have a 500GB Western Digital Sata drive, that has probably a missing or damaged MBR or Patition table.

Unfortunately I can not even boot a rescue cd if the faulty Disk is attached.

If I try to to boot windows, from another disk, or an PE based live Boot CD or the windows 8 Installation CD, and attach the faulty disk as secondary disk, I get stuck at the screen, where the Windows progress bar is shown, and it newer gets further.

Also other boot CD's like Hiren, or Gparted, etc. stuck at some point, which I guess is, when they try to recognise the faulty disk.

I can however boot just fine, If the faulty disk is NOT attached.

So far I have tried 5 different boot disks.

The only application that boots just fine is Acronis Disk Suite 11 (however Gparted from Hiren or any other Dos Program fails).

In Acronis I can see the Disk and its partitions. I also formated the first partition, that used to conatin a WIndows 7 Install, but the disk still is not recognised by other Tools or the WIndows Setup CD.

There are 4 other Partitions that contain important data, that I do not want to format.

Unfortunately, No boot cd is able to boot while this faulty Disk is attached, so that i can not backup my data from the remainig partitions.


So far I have spent 5 days trying to boot into some system that would enable me to either repair the MBR or Partition Table, or at leas Backup my data, while the faulty disk is attached, but have not been able to succedd so except for Acronis Disk Suite.

I suspect, that the MBR and the Partition table is damaged and every Tool that hangs at boot has problem processing, whit this damage. Therefore I found this site and was hoping that someone has a solution for me how to proceede.

My biggest problem is, that I can't even boot a rescue cd or Windows, when I attach the faulty Disk. The resuce cd's only boot, when I disconnect the faulty drive, but then the booted system are useless to me.

Anyone knows what the problem here is and has a solution.

I really need to access the data again.

Please help.

Rocket
Posts: 3
Joined: 25 Nov 2014, 13:28

Re: Damaged MBR Partition Table prevents eeven Booting Boot

#2 Post by Rocket »

OK. I have solved the problem by following the example on the manual page and running TestDisk on the damaged drive.

TestDisk wrote a new MBR and Partition Table, that allowed me to access one of the Partition that contained my Data.

After this procedure, I was able to boot also with this disk attached.

Unfortunately there is also a Partition encrypted with veracrypt that was not recognised.

This Partition is the last Partition on the disk, and was not recognised by TestDisk at all.

As this is a different Subject, I have created a new Topic and I'm discusiing it there.

Please see the other Topic I have created.

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