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Jeremy E
Asked: 2009-06-19 11:56:09 +0800 CST

How to retrieve files from a drive that has lost its master boot record

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We have a developer who lost their MBR on their laptop and we would like to recover the sourcecode on his drive does anybody have any suggestions on recovering this data. We have used FixBoot.exe and FixMBR.exe to replace the damaged boot record and that allows us to do directory searches but nothing returns. Any help would be appreciated.

hardware business-continuity data-recovery

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    There is a nice blog post and tutorial here:

    Data recovery - NTFS with broken MBR and MFT

    The author mentions the whole procedure and two open source tools:

    I hope you succeed in repairing the partition.
    Good luck!

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  2. Try doing a bootscan /rebuild and a bootscan /scan

    If it is a sata drive hook it up to a PC and try and see if utilities such as Recuva (Freeware) are able to find anything

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  3. I'd first try TestDisk to gracefully recover the partition info. Failing that, I'd then try PhotoRec to recover the source files. Both tools can be found at www.cgsecurity.org.

    Another good recovery tool is "foremost" which can be found on sourceforge.

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