Need data recovery help

[Alex Ethridge]

I have a hard disk here that died right in front of me. We had identified some bad surface area and were in process of copying the data to backup in preparation for replacing it.

We restarted the computer and it came up with "Missing Operating System". The boot sector seems to be gone along with the partition table. I've run Active Partition Recovery to no avail. I'm sure that if I were skilled at direct disk editing, I could correct the problem well enough to recover something; but, I have no expertise there.

Utilities that run under Windows probably won't help as the data is in an area that is seen by Windows as "unallocated space".

What utilities are there that might help?

 

[JohnWill]

You might try PC Inspector, it appears that your partition table was wiped out, which is one issue this addresses pretty well.

 

[Alex Ethridge]

Thanks, I'll give it a try. If you think of anything else, please let me know.

 

[Mulderator]

You could also just try the old chkdsk /f which you can run from the Recovery Console off a Windows CD disc. I once had that same problem (not exactly the same--but a disc error) and was able to read the disc after it ran.

Also, did you try this disc as a slave?

 

[JohnWill]

If it's all unallocated space, CHKDSK won't run.