I'm seriously in need of a hand here. I accidentally deleted the boot sector of a hard drive and I'm trying to recover the data. Does anyone have a good freeware or open source data recovery program? I'm using WinXP sp2 if that matters (the only ones I found were linux, and I suck at linux). Any help would be appreciated. Thanks

Can't you just rewrite a standard boot sector with fdisk (or the equivalent tool in XP as I am on ME and it's fdisk I would use to make the drive bootable again) ?

Or put your drive as slave on another computer and just copy the files you want to keep.

If it's only the boot sector that is damaged there is no need for file recovery programs IMO.

I could be exposing my lack of knowledge here. The drive is showing up as "unallocated space" in partition magic. Is there any other info needed to diagnose this?

Thanks again.

if you've just deleted the partition and not overwritten the drive at all, use this to fix it!

http://www.cgsecurity.org/index.html?testdisk.html

save my life a few months ago when i deleted a partition by accident!

its a program that runs in windows, scans your discs and you can choose which disc to scan, then it'll find recently removed partitions

Did you delete the MBR of a hard drive or the bootsector of a partition?

Test disk should be able to help in both cases.

Read here also:

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=30378&st=30

To re-create the MBR AFTER Testdisk has recovered the correct geometry.

If it is a bootsector of a partition, can you post which filesystem is used on that partition?

NTFS stores a "spare" bootsector:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...b;EN-US;q153973

Read these also FAT16/FAT32 only:

http://forum.winimage.com/viewtopic.php?t=163

http://forum.winimage.com/viewtopic.php?t=276

http://forum.winimage.com/viewtopic.php?t=278

jaclaz

Edited February 28, 200620 yr by jaclaz

It was a NTFS logical partition used in a data server. Before that it was used as part of a stripped raid for my OS. I think I failed to correctly delete the raid sector. The OS on the server crapped out and I threw the HD back in my main box (where the raid orig existed) and then accidentally deleted the raid partition. I thought I correctly reformatted the drive but clearly I did not.

Thanks for all of the prompt responses. I've lurked here for quite a while and have been consistantly impresses with the knowlege here.

Edited February 28, 200620 yr by Cynikal

Sorry, I was editing the post while you replied.

So, no prob, just follow the MS tutorial in the link above to retrieve the copy from end of partition.

Though the fact that it is seen as "unallocated space" seems more like a MBR problem, usually partitions that have a faulty bootsector but a valid MBR show normally under disk management, then when you click on them in explorer, windows says that partition is not formatted....

jaclaz

Edited February 28, 200620 yr by jaclaz

Thanks to everyone who responded. I'll give this a try when I get home.

Worked like a charm guys. Thanks again.

what did you use in teh end?

Test Disk repaired the MBR and it was like it never happened. This is a great tool, before I've lost data with mistakes like this. Always good to add a new tool to the toolbox. Thanks again.