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HPFS and Winxp

K

Kenazo

Lifer
Ok, so here is a weird one a friend of mine asked me to solve.

He has a ~10gig hdd that was running under winxp pro. Apparently one of his friends was trying to change the score displayed by some stupid game through regedit. The story my friend gave me is that his computer then froze, and when it rebooted he couldn't get at anything on the hard drive. Jump forward a bit. Now, when I install the hdd in a computer that works, and use partition magic 7 on it, it shows me that the drive is 100% full and that it is in HPFS. How would this have miraculously occured? The bad thing is a bunch of his wife's old assignments back from when she was still in high school are on there, so she wants to keep them for nastalgia's sake. Any idea what's going on? Partition magic won't let me do anything to the drive b/c it says the mbr is no good, but I can't find any way to fix it either.
 
Well, I can help with the MBR part...

Boot to a floppy with utilities (you can get one off of http://bootdisk.com) and run:

fdisk.exe /mbr

which will write a new MBR to the hard drive.

Caveat #1: Since this is an undocumented switch in Fdisk.exe, I do NOT know how to get Fdisk to write the MBR of a particular HD. In other words, just to be sure, this should be the only hard drive in the system when you run this command! That is the only way to guarantee you're writing an MBR to the right drive...

Caveat #2: I have personally never had "fdisk /mbr" cause me to lose any data, but ANY time you are dealing with partition management, it's a risky business. I'd tell you to back up your data first, but obviously you can't do that... So just like any advice you receive off the Internet, my advice should be checked against another independent source (like an authoritative website or experienced user) that confirms what I'm telling you is correct!

Good luck!
 
Get a second (or third) opinion on what Partition Magic is seeing. HPFS support was removed
after version 6, so I'm not sure I would compeltely trust what PM7 is telling you.

Run Disk Manager and check what it thinks the filesystem and status is on that drive.

If you can't see it from there, check with your friend that he did not have some utility
(like System Commander) that might have marked the partition as hidden.

 
I'm just having a hard time of understanding why this NTFS drive would change itself to HPFS. Seems bizarre to me. I'll try and find an old copy of pmagic.
thanks for your info, keep the suggestions coming. 🙂
 
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