HD hosed. Corrupt MBR or partition table?

[multiplexed]

I have a machine that wouldn't boot one morning. The bios sees the drive and my partitioning software see's the drive as 100% free space. I've tried fdisk /mbr and fixboot, but neither utility can see any fixed disk. I've scanned for viruses, but the scanner didn't scan any mbr or boot record. I went into the partitioning utility, and the mbr is totally blank. I tried setting the drive active and writing a standard mbr, but the apply button to write the changes is greyed out. I also tried the undelete button, which did nothing for about 15 minutes until I hit the stop button.

What else can I try? Are there any utilities to rebuild a mbr, something else, or am I barking up the wrong tree?

 

[ameoba]

It sounds like your main problem is the partition table, not your MBR.

If you know how it was partitioned, you could just recreate the partitions and go from there (IE - if the whole drive is one partition, you're set). If you don't know, there's some util (I can't remember the name of it) that knows enough about NTFS to discover partition boundaries & rebuild the partition table for you.