Hard Drive 0'd by itself, possible?

[zpsyx9]

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?

 

[corkyg]

There are boot sector viruses that can do this. Approach it from that perspective.

 

[Russwinters]

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.