Booted from UBCD - C: drive is now toast?

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EDH
Posts: 3
Joined: Fri Feb 19, 2010 5:16 pm

Booted from UBCD - C: drive is now toast?

#1 Post by EDH » Fri Feb 19, 2010 5:27 pm

Hi there,

Friend was unable to boot into Windows XP Home due to winlogon.exe application error. Could not access safe mode or any other configuration, would only get fatal error BSOD. Had the SecurityEssentials2010 "nag" virus.

Tried Recovery Console, was able to browse c:\windows and system32 folders, deleted the warnings.html and other exe's associated with the virus. Still could not boot without BSOD on winlogon error.

Loaded UBCD, it loaded the preliminary files and I selected File Management to start. Wasn't sure how to proceed, backed out and tried recovery console again. Nothing there. Now only boots to black screen with blinking cursor in top left corner.

Removed drive and loaded into another PC to try and view personal folders, back up what we could, etc. Drive appears as blank slate, asking to be formatted.

Put drive back in original machine, booted with UBCD. Unable to browse C: drive. It can see it as a 160 GB drive, but it might as well be a brand new drive. Trying to do a DIR on it only returns "drive has no label".

How can I restore access to the drive? Is the data still there or has it somehow been purged? I'm hoping this can be fixed so I can just grab as much photos, documents, etc, before reformatting and doing a clean install.

Thanks!

EDH
Posts: 3
Joined: Fri Feb 19, 2010 5:16 pm

#2 Post by EDH » Sat Feb 20, 2010 3:18 am

I figured out that the main C partition was NTFS so it was invisible to DOS. However, I'm not sure why the drive has lost it's label and file structure without being formatted.

I'm sure the data is still there as the disk was not wiped or formatted, but how to tell the system to discover the files?

EDH
Posts: 3
Joined: Fri Feb 19, 2010 5:16 pm

#3 Post by EDH » Sun Feb 21, 2010 6:27 pm

In case anyone else has similar issue:

Was able to recover the "lost" data using TESTDISK. Downloaded and ran it from a secondary PC. Swapped the drive into this PC as a secondary, ran Testdisk for Windows and selected it. I was able to list the files and copy what I could to the other disk in the machine. Also, the heads parameter was shown as 240, suggested it be changed to 255. Once this change was made it found the partitions and I could see the file structure again.

Have backed up the data and can now reformat and reinstall the OS.

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