Code|Beta

Last night a friend of mine called me and told me that his sister had damaged the computer after trying to download MSN Messenger, I was like WTF?! He runs Windows, I know this thing can fail at any time, but have the whole system fail by simply trying to download MSN Messenger, I mean, come on, you have to be kidding me. So he came home with his PC so that I could repair it.

So first thing I did was power that old box up and it came up with the “Missing NTLDR” error, so my first thought was that the boot sector had been wiped, so no issue there. After running the Windows XP installed, my friend would rather reinstall everything than resolve the issue, I saw that the hard drive appeared as if it had no partition table, but prior to that I just had looked over really quick and thought the HD was partitioned, so I went ahead and deleted the “partition”. At that point I saw that it was two HDs and not one, my reaction “woops!” and I rebooted the machine hoping that the changes were not written to the drive, after reboot I saw that they actually were written to the drive, at this point I told my friend that I had made a mistake, oh well life goes on, he just lost the data in the 40GB HD.

So I moved on to installing the OS, I told my friend that I would be able to restore the partition, while attempting to partition the hard drive I noticed that it took longer than expected to even start formating the drive. On my second try I determined that either the drive was bad or the cable was bad, so we took the drive out of that box and proceeded to connect the drive to my PC for testing, it turns out that the partition table was alright and that the data was still intact, so the issue was the cable, after replacing the cable I was able to install Windows on that box.

Ok, so I begin the process on finding out how to restore the other HD, since I didn’t format the drive the data should still be there and all I would need to do is restore the partition table. While talking with the people over at NYLUG, I mentioned the issue I had and that the file system was NTFS, one of the people in the room said “good luck with that” at which point I laughed, my friend was like what happened and I replied “you don’t want to know” after which I explained to him what my friend had mentioned.

So I made an image of the HD using dd, after that was finished, I ran parted on that image and ran the rescue command, using “rescue 0 512″, and it took more than 30 minutes to complete the scan. Now I thought that it was 512MB, but at this point I don’t know, so we took the calculation as to how much time it would take to restore that partition table, and it came out to about 40 hours, so no issues I would leave one of my Netras working on that image for 40 hours. This morning I set everything up to run the command, but I ran “rescue 0% 100%” and after like 3 seconds it had found the partition and restored it, so I was disappointed when I saw that it didn’t even take one hour to do so, but the HD is fully restored right now and my friend has been informed already.

The system will be up and running by the end of today, hopefully.

-LM