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Topic: Nuked MBR (Read 2542 times) previous topic - next topic
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Nuked MBR

Last week I accidentally killed my main drive's MBR, and I lost about 70 Gigs of really nice stuff, and I had no backup of ANYTHING there...

I installed an OS on my second drive to keep going and I'm now trying to figure out how to build a new Master Boot Record from the scratch and reload it. I don't really want to lose that precious data.

Can anyone help me with that? Any free tool out there that I should be aware of?


Thank you in advance

Nuked MBR

Reply #1 –
For these emergencies, I have Acronis Recovery Expert.
http://www.acronis.com/products/recoveryexpert/

I already lost some partitions, due both to viruses and clueless people running format where they shouldn't, and RecoveryExpert never failed recovering everything.

It's not free, but, IMO, it's a great value for only 30 dollars.

Nuked MBR

Reply #2 –
Quote
For these emergencies, I have Acronis Recovery Expert.
http://www.acronis.com/products/recoveryexpert/

I already lost some partitions, due both to viruses and clueless people running format where they shouldn't, and RecoveryExpert never failed recovering everything.

Are you implying you belong to that category, Roberto?  jk

The old Norton Utilities for Win9x used to have recovery tools which worked wonders for me.  Also, I seem to remember hearing that Windows has a backup of its MBR which you can restore.  B)

Nuked MBR

Reply #3 –
Quote
Are you implying you belong to that category, Roberto?   jk

Actually, I am 

But I only did that once. On other occasions, cousins and friends were to blame.

Nuked MBR

Reply #4 –
How exactly did you kill the MBR?
"You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say will be misquoted, then used against you."

Nuked MBR

Reply #5 –
My drive had originally two partitions, one for the OS (winXP pro) and the other for the data and a couple of programs. Then I decided to create a small fat32 partition before the first one (the OS one is NTFS) in order to install Win 98 SE for some old games that would't work on XP.  I did all the partitioning using Partition Magic nad had no problems at all.

But when I started to install Win98 SE, the CD was corrupt (or something really weird happened) and the installation crashed at the very beginning. I popped out the CD and restarted the whole thing, to find that my drive was now "unformatted", and the MBR was gone. Wonderful.

I'm aware that I could use the WinXP CD to restore the MBR, but I'm not sure if this would work with a partitioned drive, and I'm really scared that I could screw it.


Manu
 

Nuked MBR

Reply #6 –
Acronis Recovery Expert did the job nicely. Great tool.

Thank you Roberto, didn't know about it.


Enjoy!