Invalid Partition Table and data recovery

[frozentax2]

Here's the scoop: Running Win2k SP4 with all updates, I turned on my computer this morning and it wouldn't boot. Went to the recovery console, ran fixboot and fixmbr on the drive/partition with ntldr and ntdetect.. I boot up again and get an "Invalid Partition Table" error!

I have two partitions on harddisk0, one for the WinNT install, the other for data. Well, the data partition is the one with the invalid partition table, and is now inaccessible.

I plugged in another hard drive so I could boot into another Win2k installation, and ran findntfs on the invalid partition. It finds all of my files, however, it can only recover some. Any suggestions as to what program/procedure to recover all data? I don't see how any of it could have been overwritten, unless the hard drive itself is bad?

Thanks!

 

[Smilin]

If you run fixmbr on a system that is missing the end of sector marker for sector zero (55 AA) it will not know where to stop zeroing out data after the boot code but before the disk signature. You've likely zero'd out your partition table.

If you rebuild your partition table to get your volumes back you can run chkdsk on them and likely get your data back. You're going to need to rebuild that table by hand. Enterprise tech support at Microsoft can do it if you need. If there is some further damage to the filesystem/MFT they won't be able to help you.

I'm not familiar with findntfs but it's likely just searching your drive for your primary and backup MFT. If they are intact you might be ok.