Bad boot sector - Recovery help

**mirrorcoloured** · March 5th, 2011, 06:28 PM

I have an old hard drive (TOSHIBA MK4025GAS) that I recently got an enclosure for. Upon plugging it in, I find two partitions:

H: (9.77 gb) NTFS, and has only a clean Windows XP install.
I: (27.49 gb) FAT16 (not sure why) but reads as 0 bytes and RAW through Windows.

I like to partition HDD's like this so that I can very easily wipe Windows and reinstall it if I need to (which it looks like I did). Unfortunately, the problem lies in the I: partition.

TestDisk reveals the following:
Partition | Start | End
1 * HPFS - NTFS | 0 1 1 | 1274 254 63
2 E extended LBA | 1275 0 1 | 4862 254 63
Invalid FAT boot sector
5 L FAT16 LBA | 1275 1 1 | 4862 254 63
5 L FAT16 LBA | 1275 1 1 | 4862 254 63

Though upon searching it only reveals the first partition (0 - 1274).
I ran TestDisk in a DOS shell instead of windows to access the boot sector, which is revealed to be completely filled with 0x00
I tried running the Repair Boot Sector utility through TestDisk but it did nothing.

I ran GetDataBack for FAT, and after a few hours it returned 9 file systems similar to

FAT16 at sector 22,711,815, cluster size 8 (27,706 MB)

Inside each of these systems are 4-15 ish files with nonsense names and attributes
ex.
PFò-n*ìG.4â
ÇdµQQSï+.FP2

I've run a few other diagnostic tools but none of them were able to determine anything further. I'm in the process of copying the partition onto another blank drive so that I can try things further (using Roadkil's RawCopy)

From what I've gathered:
FAT16 does not make a backup boot sector, and I don't have the data backed up anywhere else, so recovery of the boot sector is out of the question. This means the sector must be rebuilt, but I'm not sure how to go about doing that.

Also, having the primary partition of the drive as NTFS and this partition as FAT16 might be a problem?

**Chuckiechan** · March 5th, 2011, 10:02 PM

Are you trying to save or recover data?

If you are, have tried hooking it up as a slave drive and seeing if you can pull it off that way?

If not, then go to the mfg's website and they should have a utility that will do everything you need.

**mirrorcoloured** · March 5th, 2011, 11:16 PM

Yes, I am trying to recover the data.

It is currently in a usb 2.0 enclosure and running as a slave drive.

I searched toshiba.com and all I could find were backup utilities which won't help me now.

**stroyal** · March 6th, 2011, 01:45 AM

Mixing partitions with NT, and FAT file systems is no problem at all, so it's not that.

Sounds like corrupt data, or it is hidden somehow.

**mirrorcoloured** · March 6th, 2011, 01:49 AM

I re-ran TestDisk's boot sector repair utility and decided to say yes to the "were files created under Vista" prompt. It came up with this:

Read error at 10681/250/8 (lba=171606022)

It still did not find any further partitions, but this leads me to believe something outside of the boot sector is wrong as well?

**Richard Cranium** · March 6th, 2011, 06:53 PM

FAT16 was used for Win95

A drive that size most certainly never used in a W95 system, I suspect a virus.

Once I had a system with NTFS that went south, searching the drive showed a FAT12 partition.

Using BC Wipe, and overwriting it about a dozen times, the drive worked again.

A CAUTION, hooking up and attempting to recover data can transfer some viruses to your "good" machine.

I suggest hooking the drive up in a machine with NO Important Data just in case.

I keep a box just for such HD recovery's when customers have similar issues.

Doc