Please help me recove lost partitions

L

lunchbox

n00b
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Sep 15, 2003
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So the other day my pc crashed b/c of the northbridge overheating.. \This time it did some damage to the ntoskrnl.exe file and probably the mbr. I rebooted into the windows recovery program and tried to run the fixboot command, this didn't work it gave me an error msg saying it could not complete the task. So i run chkdsk with the repair command. \After that ran and fixed some errors i tried to fixboot again, didnt' work. Now, I tried to see if I could plug in my drive to my laptop via a usb/sata hub and windows loaded the drivers for the hard drive but did not give me access to the partitions on it. I look under disk management and see there's the partitions but they no longer have the fat32 designation, just says healthy and the size of the partition(s).

For some reason i decide to plug the drive back into my pc and reinstall windows xp onto the 1st partition ~117gb (out of 1tb) probably thinking I could try and recover the partitions after I load into windows...

Anyhow, i scrapped that idea since it would best to try and recover the partitions with proper partition recovery programs. I tried a couple from the hiren's boot cd and they came up empty - cannot find the lost partitions, the programs say there's no partitions to recover. Also tried testdisk to recover said partitions but after scanning the drive, it did not show any partitions.

Can someone with expertise in this field give me an idea what to do next? I am open to sending the drive into data recovery experts, but would like to have a recommendation on one that won't cost me hundreds of dollars if possible.



Please help!!
 
something not clear:

1TB hdd
so which partition did XP reside originally? (hope not the same one you re-installed)


*something you should have done with HirenCD was bootup with miniXP and check your partition/folders.
 
Thanks for your reponses. I bookmarked the techrepub link for future reference when the boot files get corrupted. Unfortunately I'm a bit further along in more technical assistance than what the guide could offer.

To clarify, the newly installed xp was installed onto the same (i assume since the 1st available partition size offered by windows setup was the same as the original partition that I had created for the os long before all this went down) partition as the original xp install.

Yesterday I deleted the partition on which xp was installed the 2nd time.

Also, I'm getting more feedback on the lost partitions from testdisk now that I am running the program with admin priviledges. Before I ran testdisk with admin priv., it was only viewing the active partition that I installed xp onto (2nd time) - which prompted me to delete that active partition.

At this point I will stop messing with the partitions and have been recommended to - Make an identical bit-by-bit copy of the existing drive, using a Linux boot stick, and the dd command (ie: dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=100M) and then manipulate the bit-by-bit copy.

So that'll be done today. What should be my next step?
 
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