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Hard Drive 0'd by itself, possible?

Z

zpsyx9

Junior Member
I do a little repair work on the side and got a laptop from someone with little experience saying she was using her PC and after restarting it got a "Invalid system disk" error message.

After a little investigation I found that the drive was lacking a boot partition and from there checked to see if there are any files to be recovered. After running some recovery software I turned up with 0 files, 0 folders... nothing after searching all sectors for both NTFS and FAT32 partition / file information.

S.M.A.R.T. results check back OK and there are no bad sectors...

Is it possible for a hard drive to just "wipe" by itself like this? Maybe she had someone do a half-assed reformat and they messed it up somehow? How could this have happened and are there any other options for recovery?
 
There are boot sector viruses that can do this. Approach it from that perspective.
 
It wouldn't be able to 0 the drive THAT fast.


SMART doesn't necessarily mean much.


What software did you use?



I can take a look at this one, it is intriguing me.


You can PM me if you customer is serious about wanting the data.
 
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