The hard drive is partitionless
 

Hey guys

My mother-in-law's computer died. It was working one day, and the next day they got a "Operating system not found..." error message right after POST.

I've removed the hard drive and plugged it into an external USB chassis. It shows up as a drive in Windows, but gives the "The drive is not formatted, would you like to format now?" error when trying to explore it. It looks like it's lost it's partitioning.

I ran a recovery tool on it and it looks like most of the data will be recoverable. My question is, however, if there is a tool I can use to fix the partition information so that the drive will boot again? I really want to avoid the hassle and time a data-copy and re-install is going to take. Plus, it'll make a great impression on my new in-laws. :)

Any suggestions or information will be appreciated.

Thanks,
H

This is my highly un-technological answer: I highly doubt it. They should be impressed that you're getting any data off of that drive!

Partition recovery works great. I used it several times at my last 2 jobs.
Active@ Partition Recovery. Recover Deleted Partition. Undelete NTFS & FAT partitions.

Simple cheap program, but saves the day every time.

Obviously, if you can get the data off of the drive, I would do that and trash/RMA the drive. I would not recommend you boot from it. Make it a slave if you can get the partition recovered.

Yeah..the idea was to have it boot up and let them copy their data off it immediately and then format the bugger. But I guess I should be happy enough just being able to get to some of the data. In fact, there's some music and pics of my own I need to get off of it. Crap. I forgot.

Luciferase - I'll check out that software, thanks.

Grab a second harddrive and reinstall windows back onto the new drive then install the second one as a slave. After you have windows setup just drag and drop the files. That's what I would do, if it is more than just messed up partion table, you might have more problems than you orginally thought. Plus I would run a full virus/spyware check just to make sure.

Edit: Just realized that I suggested what you didn't want to do. Next time I'll read more carefully. Here is a program that before it went to shareware it could remake partions and other nifty things on the fly. http://www.prime-expert.com/ebcd/index.php EBCD.

I've seen this problem quite a few times; assuming the hard drive isn't physically damaged (bad sectors, etc.) when part of the MBR or partition table becomes corrupt, things are often no more than a few keystrokes away from being back to normal, without any serious data recovery needed.

Keep the drive plugged into a host computer by USB, and download the Windows version of TestDisk from cgsecurity.org (freeware!) to analyse and restore the partition tables.
Reboot, then run CHKDSK to clean up any other problems left behind on the restored partitions.

If you've got access to an old win98 bootup disk with the tools on it, boot up and at a prompt, do a A:\format /mbr

this will format JUST the boot record, should bring up your hard drive and all of its data.

If the drive is failing you don't want to try and put the OS back on that drive. Get a new drive, install an OS, migrate old data over using recovery tools and rest assured knowing the drive is not likely to fail again next week.

Spinrite.....works great.