HELP.....Win 7 HDD crashed, wont boot.

Mark Bloggs

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Oct 4, 2015
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Eeeeek !

My hard drive crashed, would just about boot into Windows 7 but kept going really slow and hanging. So tried Safe Mode and it kept getting stuck and wouldn't boot either Ughhh. So, I did several chkdsk's, as it kept cycling, which did no good and then it wouldn't boot at all.

Right, so, I did a HDD Regenerator from Hirens boot disk to recover 661 bad sectors, as it said it wouldnt delete data.

Then I have used Partition Wizard to scan for lost partitions and I'm not sure what to do next as I have...

100mb system reserved and the rest of the 2TB unallocated..... but I also have about 10 lost/deleted boot partitions (overlapping).

I presume my data is still there so my questions are these....

What has happened?

Can I make this Windows drive boot again?

If so....how?

Do I need to delete/merge these partitions or need to fix the MBR or what really?

If you delete partitions, does that delete corrupt Data?

Your help would be much appreciated.

Mark



 
Hi

If the bad sectors were in locations where partition information or boot information was located the HDD probably will not be of any use anymore and will not boot up windows again

Try TestDisk + Photorecovery from cgsecurity.org (found on Hirens in Parted Magic linux cd 2012 )
TestDisk can probably re build the partition data and recover some files but as the HDD is dying you need to replace it.

Get the latest TestDiak version 7 if you have a GPT partitioned HDD.
Hirens has a old version (from 2012)

Hirens has Western Digital Data Lifeguard for Windows and a collection of other bootable HDD diagnostics

I would run the correct one for your brand of HDD to see if the HDD has been fixed by HDD Regenerator or not

If HDD not fixed then data recovery will be difficult
Using DDRescue to clone bad HDD to another HDD may provide a way forward to recovering data from a slightly damaged HDD.

I hope you have some backups of important data

regards
Mike Barnes

 
 
Hi Mike,

Thanks for taking the time to reply to me.

I think I am resigned to the fact that the Windows installation wont ever boot again as I had a small [System Reserved] partition of 100MB which I thought was the boot partition because it wouldn’t boot in the end. I had another that was Unallocated/Unformatted, which is the bit I don’t understand, this was the majority of the disk.

I am hoping the data on the latter is intact, or near to. Hopefully the bad sectors didn’t stray into the latter too much either.

If a partition is deleted/lost....that doesn’t effect the data right....it should be recoverable right, the same with a deleted/corrupt MBR right??

TestDisk says there is one error at one address lba=209792, so I am hoping there is quite a bit still intact.

When I look at the disk as a secondary disk in another windows install, it says Windows cant access the disk and wants to format it, which obviously I hastily reject.

Do I actually need the Reserved Partition any more. I get the impression that if I got rid of that partition I might be able to view the rest of the disk or make the disk readable ??????

I haven't got the new backup drive yet but will I be able to just see what I can recover, will software I try list the files for me??

Regards

Mark


PS: Sorry new to this forum shit, I hate them generally, cant get a straight answer from any support desks these days LOL.