HELP: My HD lost its PARTITION info!!!

[vladgur]

I reconnected L1 bridges on my TBird 1GHZ put it back in, set the cpu to 9.0x145. Rebooted, started WinME, which seemed to load just fine. Unfortunately, which my keyboard and mouse did not respond, so I had to turn the power off and reboot again. I then switch the FSB settings back to 7.5x133 I booted into Safe-mode and initiated a normal restart. After that, no boot device error popped up, even though the HD was recognized by the BIOS(Note, this HD is connected to a regular IDE1 port(Its the only HD there), not raid). I booted in from the winme bootdisk, run fdisk and showed no partition on the disk.

What can I do to restore all or some of the partition info. The data there is very important.

[wvjohn]

ouch! moved this to in general hardware - there's more traffic here - i know you can corrupt your hd overclocking - there are some gurus around who might have a handle on this -

[Kakarot]

have you tried running scandisk off of the win9x boot disk to see if it finds anything wrong and can fix it? other than that I'm not sure.

[smb]

are your bridges connected cleanly and not shorting out against each other ?

[FlyingPenguin]

There's always risks when overclocking. Some drives don't like to see an off-frequency bus and can corrupt the drive. In very rare cases the drive can be damaged.

Wiping all partition information is pretty unusual.

I'd first try putting the drive in another computer to make sure there isn't something wacky going on with this system (the drive might be fine and trying to fix it may corrupt it).

If the drive is definately wiped than the only app that has any hope of restoring it is Power Quest's Lost and Found. I've seen this utility restore a drive that had had it's partitions deleted and was re-partitioned, formatted and had Windows re-installed - although it took most of a day for it to do it. It perfectly restored an old bootable install of 98 - rather amazing actually.

[vladgur]

How would shorting bridges be affecting the partition info of the drive? Otherwise system is working fine.Except maybe the fact that when I set the multiplier to 10x or 9.5x it switched back to 9x automatically, but I dont think that is related

[Cool J]

if you set it at 10 or 9.5 and it switches back to 9 that means the bridges are done well enough. do them over.

[Executioner]

If all else fails, you could try this command:
fdisk /mbr

Info:

What is the MBR?
At the end of the ROM BIOS bootstrap routine, the BIOS reads and executes the first physical sector of the first floppy or hard disk drive on the system. This first sector of the hard disk is called the master boot record (or sometimes the partition table or master boot block). At the beginning of this sector of the hard disk is a small program. At the end of this sector is where the partition information, or partition table, is stored. This program uses the partition information to determine which partition is bootable (usually the first primary DOS partition) and attempts to boot from it.
This program is what is written to the disk by FDISK /MBR and is usually called the master boot record. During normal operation, Fdisk writes this program to the disk only if there is no master boot record.

Got the above from: http://www.compguystechweb.com/troubles ... k/mbr.html

[coyote]

I'd try to set another HD to boot, put yours as a slave, run Partition Magic from the master, in the program select the part that you lost, and there is an option to restore partition, I restore my data that way.

[vladgur]

hey CoolJ,
Did you mean to say that
my bridges are done well enough or are not done well enough?

[Frost]

he meant are not.

[Jen]

I also recommend Power Quest Lost and Found as it saved me from losing alot of files when my boot sector and fat partition both got scrambled


Jen