Crazy hard drive problem, challenge for experts. HELP!!

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hundredhead

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Jul 23, 2011
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18,530
Hello,
Ok, it all began with simple error when my computer booted up.It would shut down while on the windows loading screen.Also when I went into safe mode it would say something about spdt.sys or something like that. after researching on the internet it seemed like everyone said to boot the recovery console and use fixboot and fixmbr. Unfortuneatly it now caused further problems and now my computer said "ntrld is missing". I tried to copy the file from my usb in the recovery console but it kept saying access denied.On the internet it said that it was due to not having the right admin password.The recovery password didnt even ask me for a passwordor to select my os!After that I booted up with linux to try and save my files but in linux it said that on the hard drive that there was only 10 mb of space total on the hard drive and I was using 3.1 mb of it( this is an 80 gb mind you). The folder was blank and unwriteable. After that I ran a chkdsk repair in recovery console and it gave the same details as the linux. I researched alittle more(by the way thanks for staying with me so far:))and found out that I should just try a simple repair from the windows xp cd. unfortueneatly I dont have one so I had to download an iso and burn it to a cd. I tried to use it but the seccond repair option never came up.I gave up on that decide to use my last resort which was to actually go into my computer and hook it up to my other computer as a slave. It did and said the same thing as linux. I put it back and did even more research and found no one had the same problem as me but some people reported their HD saying that there was only 32 mb on a hd with 1000 gb(1tb) so i assumed that it was the same problem just different proportions. They advised that you download ultimatebootcd and boot it. That fix didnt work either.although there was a disk diagnostic tool from the manufacturer(seagate)on the ultimatebootcd and it said that there was one error which it fixed but it didnt do anything to solve my problem. You are probably exhausted from reading all of this but Im asking for your help. This may even be a challenge for experts so Im not expecting much.

Thanks
 
Solution
Sorry, I misread your first post. I mistook your drive as being a 1TB rather than an 80GB.

In fact it is at full capacity. Sector Inspector is reporting the size of PHYSICALDRIVE1 as ...

10337 Cylinders x 240 Heads x 63 Sectors Per Track x 512 BytesPerSector

= 80,023,265,280 bytes

The problem is that Microsoft's FIXBOOT has trashed your original NTFS boot sector (LBN 63) by replacing it with a 10MB FAT12 boot sector. FAT12 is the file system that was used on floppy diskettes and on sub-32MB HDDs. It beggars belief why any programmer would do such a stupid thing.

Anyway, the good news is that the partition table (LBN 0) is still intact, and Sector Inspector appears to have found an NTFS backup boot sector at LBN 156296384. This...