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I've been dealing with this shit all day and at this point I'm beyond frustrated. I just want this shit to be over with. I basically have two problems, but one of them is more important to me than the other. So if you have any ideas for the problem with PC1, I'm happy to hear them... but I want PC2 fixed and I'd like that to be the priority. I've done my best to not make it a wall of text, but I... I sort of failed.
The day started off with me trying to fix one of my computers. We'll call this PC1. The thing wouldn't boot. "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER" it would say. I assumed it was the hard drive. I found another one, installed a fresh copy of windows 7 on it (I did this on PC2, FWIW) and plugged the new drive in. They're both identical. 256GB solid states. Same problem. Thing wouldn't boot. I don't really remember anymore what exactly I did from there, but the thing started having trouble with its POST. It would just hang there, or have trouble detecting drives. I don't think I caused this -- I don't see how I could have -- but maybe I did.
So at this point I was thinking it was the motherboard. But I wanted to be sure. So I went to my own personal computer, which we'll call PC2, and took out it's drive. It's an HDD, not solid state. I plugged it in, and had similar problems -- the thing did not boot. So here's the real problem. PC2 won't fucking boot now. I plugged it back in, and now it says "A Disk Read Error Occurred. Press CTRL ALT DEL to restart"
I do not have a CD drive in PC2. I do, however, have a bootable USB with Win7 on it. When I tried to boot from this, I got to a page with the following message:
File: \Boot\BCD
Status: 0XC0000098
Info: The windows boot configuration data file does not contain a valid OS entry
I took the USB out, put it into the PC I'm currently on (PC3, which is my last available PC so if this goes too I'm probably just going to kill someone) and checked the BOOT folder on the USB. Luckily, there was a "BCD.backup.0001" file in there. So I restored the backup, and tried again. It worked. Unfortunately, the System Recovery Options couldn't find a windows installation. I went into the options anyways. I ran a system repair. It did nothing. Computer restarted. Same error as before, USB won't boot. Restored BCD again with the backup. There's a second backup now, "BCD.backup.0002." Spent hours on google, trying to do shit in command prompt. I think my BCD is screwed somehow? I've tried rebuilding it. The command "bootrec /rebuildbcd" says it completes successfully, but that it finds zero windows installations. Trying to navigate to "C:\boot" tells me that "The volume does not contain a recognized file system." Trying to run a chkdsk on this tells me the drive is in a RAW format. The BIOS recognizes the disk, but it says its size is 0.0GB. I replaced the HDD with that newly formatted drive from earlier into the computer, it boots fine. I tried running the HDD as a secondary drive, but when I go to My Computer I cannot access the files. I can see it, but windows cant recognize it and tells me I need to format in order to use the drive.
I really don't want to format. And I really feel like I shouldn't have to, like there's some stupid fix that will fix the broken boot sector or whatever the hell is broken and things will all be okay. But I don't know. And I hope one of you does.
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Thanks for the response! I'm getting weird stuff:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/0UuZNye.png)
It seems to only see 33MB of the 1TB drive. It lists two other identical partitions there, but it seems to just ignore them and only looks through the first one.
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http://superuser.com/questions/872318/corrupted-hdd-lost-partitions-shrunken-drive-damaged-boot-sectors-chs-and-lb
Solution: I downloaded and ran Ultimate Boot CD from a USB, which allowed me to run HDAT2 (32bit program) on a 64bit machine using some sort of DOS environment. HDAT2 reduced the HPA (Host Protected Area) to 0 blocks, restoring the original block size of the disk. This restored the original disk size from 32MB to 1TB. With that done, Testdisk wrote the partition table from my rescue Linux Live USB. Booting back to windows, DMDE recoginsed the two partitions and an NTFS search recognized the full root. I managed to save about 90% of the data that was important.
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Alright. Thank you for finding that! It seems like a very similar problem to mine. Whether this ends up helping or not, I'm very grateful. Really.
That solution is pretty damn vague though. I've managed to break it down mostly. I downloaded Ultimate Boot CD, and I've turned it into a bootable USB. I then managed to run HDAT. I'm not really sure what I was doing in HDAT, but I found an option that said something along the lines of "Auto Remove HPA." After doing that, HDAT was showing that the size of the drive is 1TB again. So far so good.
...now is where I get lost though. He used TestDisk to write a partition table from his Linux Live USB. I don't know what that means or how to do it. Do I need a Linux Live USB? I'm running out of USBs!
Afterwards I have to use DMDE, which I've briefly looked at. The program seems super complicated. I don't know how to use it, either, but maybe I can figure it out... once I get there.
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About that "he used testdisk to write a partition table", I remember when you let TestDisk search for stuff on a drive and it finds the data structures of file-systems, it then offers the option to create a partition table that fits with where those file-systems are on the drive. I don't remember details as I didn't really understand what was going on with TestDisk's weird menus.
I'm pretty sure you don't need a Linux live-system to do this. There's TestDisk for Windows and it's the same program, so you could use the Windows USB live-system you already have.
I've done the TestDisk stuff from within a normal Windows. When I worked on the problem, I had connected my corrupted drive as an additional one on that PC.
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Those live usb things are needed when you only have 1 pc and its hdd is broken and cannot boot. I don't think you need that if you have a running pc and can connect hdd's externally. testdisk should be able to fix "chs and lba don't match" thing on its own (well it seems when you google "testdisk chs and lba" ).
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WOAH. Okay, so I was fucking around with Ultimate Boot CD again. HDAT2 can easily remove the HPA, which brings the drive back up to 1TB. It looks like if the drive is then unplugged from power, though, the HPA comes back. So after doing that and plugging it back here (in PC3) as a slave, TestDisk here only sees it as 33MB. So I have to run TestDisk from UBCD on PC2, I guess. Shouldn't be a problem, except I can't get Testdisk to load. It just goes to a stupid black screen. I tried some of the failsafe boot options, but so far they all do the same -- even the one that says "try this if you get a blank/black screen," though that one does load a whole lot of stuff before going to a black screen.
So anyways, I do a lot of restarting each time I get to a black screen to try another failsafe option, and press F12 to get to the boot menu to boot from the USB. Except one time I didn't press F12 in time. And Windows fucking loaded. All of my data appears to be here, as if nothing ever happened. I can't move my mouse, though. Keyboard stuff works. Mouse ain't working for some reason. EDIT: Upon further investigation, no USB stuff seems to be working.
So I know at least that the data lives. I'm at least partially safe. But shit, this looks really good. This should be completely fixable, right? Without even a format? I just... I don't know how! What do I do now? I'm afraid to touch anything!
Maybe donwload TestDisk on PC2 now that it's booted, and try to do stuff from there on itself? Do I try running like, windows recovery stuff? I didn't do that, I just pressed "Start Windows Normally" to see if it would. It did! I'm pretty excited right now.
EDIT: Okay, so I've downloaded TestDisk on the computer. It's a pain in the ass navigating everything by keyboard only. When I select the disk, it tells me to choose which partition type I have. The hint at the bottom tells me that I should press NONE, as there is no partition table detected. Pressing Analyse in the next menu and doing a quick search finds everything immediately. If I press 'list files,' I'm able to navigate through my files, get to my desktop and everything, so it looks like its seeing everything. No deeper search required. Doing one now anyways. Don't really know where to go from here... the way it's set up, I can copy those files... but there isn't a point. Nowhere to copy them to. Maybe I just have to rewrite the partition table. How do I rewrite the partition table?
And WHY DOESN'T MY USB STUFF WORK
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United Kingdom20285 Posts
And WHY DOESN'T MY USB STUFF WORK
Maybe you're missing USB driver. I had to literally burn a CD with USB driver from another PC to do anything after getting this motherboard
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Maybe. I never actually installed them though, even the first time. Windows 7 just sort of does everything for you, you know?
...I guess it did it again. Mouse is working. I did nothing to make that happen.
Right now it looks like my computer is completely okay. I'm actually typing from it. It's as if nothing's ever happened. It's just that when I run TestDisk, it doesnt detect any partition. I assume if I unplug this thing from the power outlet, it'll all go back to shit.
Luckily everything is backed up. So I just have to... write a partition table? I think? Fix the boot sector? I can fix the boot sector with TestDisk. Or at least I can tell it to do so. I haven't done that yet. No idea how to write a partition table, but I'm pretty sure one currently does not exist so I think that's important.
EDIT: So apparently running chkdsk was enough. I think I'm good to go. TestDisk isn't seeing any problems anymore. Well, it gives a warning:
"Warning: the current number of heads per cylinder is 240, but the correct value may be 255."
but it's not a problem i dont think, since so far I've been able to access it all. Thanks everyone! I'm super grateful for all the help. Especially to xM(Z, who found that solution for me. I was ready to give up on this all. And I learned so much about hard drives in this whole process!
I guess we're done here. I'd stick a [SOLVED] into the title if I was able to. 
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gratz dude, it looks like you did all the hard work. 
in general when you get errors, just take the whole error message and plug it into google. after that you're only couple topics away from getting your answer so just filter through.
Edit: and just as a precaution, try and scan the HDDs for boot viruses. there are some nasty stuff out there that can withstand even total HDD wipes.
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EPT
