Help! My Hd Is Screwed!!!

[Hanz™]

At least it didn't corrupt the MFT, I did that, it's a real bitch to get anything back you have to use a piece of software like EvilDragon mentioned.

 

[Squidge]

XP would probably show an empty drive, and so you would need some specific sector recovery software.

It's important to know however that XP *may* try to write to the damaged drive if it considers it as valid (even if you don't), and I don't think there's any way round this apart from deleting the partitions on the drive, which would probably leave you in an even worse state.

So, best thing to do is just try it and accept any corruption.

The only OS guaranteed not to write to the drive unless requested is Linux.

 

[Drag]

Ok, then my safest bet would be Knoppix.

Now, I can't just use plain Knoppix alone, I need some sort of program that will read the physical drive into a hex editor type environment.

Is there such a program?

 

[Blah]

Ok, then my safest bet would be Knoppix.

Now, I can't just use plain Knoppix alone, I need some sort of program that will read the physical drive into a hex editor type environment.

Is there such a program?

​

Don't know what its called but Knoppix comes with one.

 

[Squidge]

'dd' reads and writes disk sectors, like I said above.
'hexdump' dumps them out in hex

eg.
================
# df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 39136840 4199084 32949716 12% /
none 94876 0 94876 0% /dev/shm
# fdisk /dev/hda

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 4998 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 4950 39760843+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 4951 4998 385560 82 Linux swap

Command (m for help): q

# dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/tmp/mysector bs=512 count=1
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
# hexdump /tmp/mysector
0000000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
*
0000200
#