1

Hey everyone,

I am in dire need of some technical help in sorting out an issue I ran into today on my PC. Today, I installed some software which came with a plotter I bought from China.

While installing, my Kaspersky internet protection popped up with a large red message stating something along the lines that this software is trying to do something (wish I remember exactly what it was). Anyhow, I checked the description and it seemed okay so I clicked okay.

The install continued and completed. I carried on working on some other stuff and never ran the software. I had to pop out the office for a while so shut down the computer and returned a few hours later. Turned the machine on and got this dreaded message…

Missing operating system_

After simultaneously shitting myself and crying violently I rummaged to find the official Vista 64 bit disc that came with the PC. I loaded it into the drive and set the CD/DVD to boot first. It looked promising and got to the “Press a key to boot from CD/DVD” or something along those lines. I pressed a button and instantly came back to the dreaded message: Missing operating system_

I then took to the internet to see if anyone else had this problem and some people had answers like disconnect all usb devices and reboot Run windows boot disk (above) etc which didn’t work.

I tried this recovery boot disk from https://neosmart.net/blog/2008/windows-vista-recovery-disc-download/

While I ran this I chose the option of “automated repair” as instructed and they said that should fix the problem but it came up with an error stating that it couldn’t find the partition. Im assuming this is relating to the operating system ie. windows.

Reward for anyone with the right answer/solution.

2

Get a USB drive or blank CD and create a Ubuntu live USB/Disk. Boot off the USB drive and take a look at your HDD.

Edit: Do not run any automated repairs/restores until you verify that your HDD is still alive.

3

That would work if he’s comfortable using Ubuntu, otherwise a usb drive and something like partition magic, need to see if the software pop’d your MBR

4

Grab a linux boot disk and see if it can open your windows partition. Report back any errors.

Alternatively, see if that cd’s “browse/backup files” works.

5

Ouch, instead of doing the automatic recovery have you followed steps akin to what’s listed here (just googling solutions)?

Check the BIOS to ensure your drive is set correctly in regard to drives connected (SATA0, etc), although it sounds more like a corruption.

If you end up not being able to recover, take the drive and put it into a secondary PC, back up all your shit, and then format and install fresh. I’m sure all your stuff is still there, just something got corrupted.

6

I am just looking into how to create the usb boot drive. Where are the downloadable ISO at?

I already checked the BIOS and it appears fine. I have a sinking feeling that its the MBR as suggested.

Will give all of this a go when I am back in the office tomorrow. Luckily, I do back up quite frequently but the last time I backed up my work and important stuff was over a month ago so there is still quite abit of valuable stuff on there that I need to recover or get access to.

This is the last time I install a cheap looking CD with poor hand writing on it.

7

What iso are you looking for? If it’s UBCD/linux/partedmagic live then check out UNetBooiIn http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net .

Also, if you can’t access the windows partition from whatever boot cd you use, try http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/fix-corrupted-windows-ntfs-filesystem-ubuntu/ (I wouldn’t use their directions for mbr fix though)

8

There’s an option in the LiveUSB program to download the iso.
Or http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop

9

Sam I have dealt with this MANY times. The simple answer for the is EVERYTIME either the HDD is shot, the cable to the HDD is bad, the MB/HDD connector is corroded/dirty or your MBR is corrupted. All of which are fairly easy to fix. I worked with this issue with dozens of computers.

BIOS can be misleading btw… what type of HDD is it? can you pull it and test on another computer eg; as a spare drive?

I dont need any reward lol… this is my kung fu and been practicing for 16+ years.

Easiest way to work this is realtime chat or phone so i can diag as things happen.

10

Sounds like whatever happened may have either zeroed or corrupted your partition table. Moving the disk to another system and acquiring data won’t work in that case.

It’s actually pretty easy (in a way) to recreate the partition table if that’s what happened, but I haven’t really done much Windows part rebuilds, mostly just in the Unix world (Solaris/Linux) so I don’t know the offsets off-hand.

There’s definitely ways to get your data, and considering it’s probably just the partition table it’d be fairly straightforward for a data recovery specialist to get your data back. Depending on the importance of your data, you might consider calling a professional data recovery service to avoid doing anything damaging.

That said, I’m sure someone in the community has enough HDD recovery experience locally to help you as well.

If it were me, I would do like many others have recommended and boot up using a Linux boot CD of some variety (I prefer to use an Arch Linux or Gentoo CD).

From there I’d check the output from:

parted --list /dev/sda


Model: ATA WDC WD2500AAKX-0 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 250GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags:

Number  Start   End    Size   Type     File system  Flags
 1      1049kB  250GB  250GB  primary  ext4

Your partition would look different. I know that Windows 7+ creates a system partition at 1, forget how it shows up, and then the data partition would show under slice 2.

If you get an error, then the partition table is borked and you’ll need to get it recreated. I have an easy way to explain how to do that but it’s kind of involved in terms of time and you’ll need another disk with a lot of space to copy your data off since you’ll need to image your entire harddrive, go through the windows reinstall/reformat, and then come back into linux and replace your image minus the offsets used by the partition table that’s in place. A data recovery specialist could probably free-hand rebuild your partition table though.

If you have your partition table in place, the next step would be to mount your FS and see if you can get it to work. Part of why I like Arch is that it will automatically have NTFS drivers in place on the boot CD.

mkdir /mnt/getmyshitback

mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/getmyshitback

(You may have to do a ‘mount -t ntfs /dev/sda2 /mnt/getmyshitback’ on other distros)
(Partition might also be a different number, reference your parted output)

cd /mnt/getmyshitback

ls

And you should see a file list. If that’s the case then it’s simply a matter of getting some other storage attached (USB drive, another drive internally) and copying the data out, and reinstalling.

11

Take the floppy disk out. :coffee:

12

Rarely is it ever the PT (maybe 6-8 years ago)… having worked this same issue many times I dont understand why you would come to that conclusion so quickly.

13

Original post.

I’ve been working enterprise level storage admin (Storage Foundation/UNIX) for about 10 years now. Partition table issues pop up constantly. I know it’s rare/uncommon in the Windows/Desktop world but Sam’s original post + my experience suggested the noted troubleshooting path.

Also note that I included steps for verifying partition table status, not assuming it’s gone. Important to confirm what’s there when it comes to data recovery before you start actually doing things.

14

If the MBR is currupted you would get the same response. If the HDD, cable, or connection you would get the same error. Autorepair is only good if you have bad sectors on the HDD really or segmented files. The PT is something that used to be an issue… not so much these days.

15

Just to clarify, for an MBR style partition layout, the MBR == partition.

Bootstrap code takes the first 446 bytes, then 4 x 16 byte partition blocks, then a 2 byte boot block signature.

This is different in GPT style labels but Windows didn’t really support those until Win7 and still defaults to MBR as far as I’m aware.

16

Thanks for all the replies/help. After reading through your suggestions, alot of the procedures are out of my abilities so I called over someone who has alot more knowledge than me when it comes to computers.

I have taken snaps of the what was done and the results.

Here are some quick snaps of the setup. Sorry if it isnt too clear but hopefully should give you all a rough idea of the arrangement.

http://i104.photobucket.com/albums/m197/b16sdm/2012%20b15sdmdesigns%20arcade%20sticks/computer%20fuck%20ups/1_zps02dc8381.jpg
http://i104.photobucket.com/albums/m197/b16sdm/2012%20b15sdmdesigns%20arcade%20sticks/computer%20fuck%20ups/2_zps5e7c16a4.jpg
http://i104.photobucket.com/albums/m197/b16sdm/2012%20b15sdmdesigns%20arcade%20sticks/computer%20fuck%20ups/3_zps1cd8c335.jpg
http://i104.photobucket.com/albums/m197/b16sdm/2012%20b15sdmdesigns%20arcade%20sticks/computer%20fuck%20ups/4_zps9a141f33.jpg

Initially, the tech guy removed both hard drives and connected them to some sort of USB cable device which can be connected to another company to read from them. He wanted to recover as much as he could before attempting any repairs.

He tested/checked each hard drive individually. The first (primary hard drive) was not readable as it came up with an error saying…“the volume does not contain a recognised file system…”

While being connected to a different computer the hard drive was recognised but the allocated space gave the impression that it was almost bare/empty. Infact the hard drive is a 500gb type and it said 465gb was allocated.

The second hard drive was even worse. While it was plugged into a different computer, it would detect but not fully. Meaning, it didnt show up under my computer but it showed the drive and “not initiated”.

I know for a fact, that my total hard drive useage was about 600-700gb as I checked a couple of months ago. So there had to be storage on both drives.

The tech guy put the hard drives back into my computer and ran the original Windows vista recovery disk to check for errors. We left this going over night as we waited 3 hours and it was still doing its thing.

I returned this morning hoping it would have sorted it but came up with the message below along with the error report.

After this he tried to manually fix it and came up with this…

http://i104.photobucket.com/albums/m197/b16sdm/2012%20b15sdmdesigns%20arcade%20sticks/computer%20fuck%20ups/7_zps77274d0d.jpg

He suggested taking my hard drives to “PC World” who are a nation wide computer retailer who also repair computers and are known to be the best at data recovery as they send the drives off their dedicated tech department who deal with data recovery (depending on make/model of hard drive).

Here is a photo of the drives.

Any suggestions guys?

Is it worth me buying some sort of back up software that can access the hard drives so at least I can extract as much as I can? I heard/read HDD mechanic is a good place to start.

17

It’s been a long time since I’ve done any kind of data recovery, so I can’t recommend any specific products, but basically there are two choices. Buy a piece of software that you run yourself, or send the harddrive to a company that will go to any lengths (from running software to taking the drives apart) to get the data. Obviously the latter is more expensive; at some point the decision becomes how much is the data worth to you.

Since there’s presumably no physical damage to the disks and you haven’t tried to reformat or anything I expect a software solution would be enough. Taking that assumption, it then becomes a question of whether you’re comfortable running the software yourself or if you’d rather pay a premium (maybe $100 or so?) to send the drive out and know that the people doing the recovery know what they’re doing.

18

Try using TestDisk, it’s included in most Linux bootdisks (tutorial http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step) and is designed for exactly this kind of problem.

If that doesn’t work, try using http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-live-cd.htm, specifically GetDataBack for NTFS. It’s saved my ass before, but it is $80 for the full version (definitely give the trial a shot first)

Also the 465 vs. 500 GB thing is to be expected, hard drives are sold in GigaBytes (1000 MB) whereas most software reads in GibiBytes (1024 MB). It’s a complicated and frankly stupid thing but that’s how it goes. ETA: Also 500 GB is about 465GiB.

19

Back again guys. Right, I have made the decision that trying to recover the data is out of my personal depth so am employing someone to do this for me. He had a quick look on his work station and showed the partition was heavily corrupted. He tried to repair this but was not possible. I have forwarded blackraen suggestions and am waiting to see what he comes up with.

He has managed to check the primary hard drive (500gb) and when connected to the “Sentinel”(?) it is showing as 930gb for some strange reason.

Anyway, he is able to view every single file on the drive and also copy them to an external hard drive. The issue were having now is that the files are extracted as raw data and appear with their icons etc but are not executable. When ever say a MS word file is opened it just comes up with coding and not the actual text that should be there.

My guy has used 2 software’s, both with the same problem of not being able to execute them. However, on the second software he used he was able to see almost 5tb of data?!!! To me, logic dictates that a 500gb can only store 500gb of data. How the hell is he able to see 5tb? Im guessing this is due to the file corruptions and its showing as alot more. I was wondering if this may be caused by the original files being stored on a windows vista 64 business edition but being recovered from a different version of operating system?

He has one more software to try before he gives up and suggest I get it sent to another friend of his who has different software.

20

Your data could increase in size due to corruption, however another possible reason (as I don’t know what software your guy is using) is that BECAUSE he is viewing raw data it is larger by nature. See with text files/pictures/etc. Information becomes compressed and packaged. If I were to take this post I’m typing out and convert it to binary in text format it would be HUGE.

I don’t know about the guy doing recovery, frankly. Look into people who do computer forensics, call your local PD and ask if they can refer someone they use, he’ll do better than your average craigslister or some best buy puke. Considering you’re able to view things in this state there is no reason that you should walk away completely empty handed. It just matters whether or not you’re willing to pay for the work. Also depending on what got you to this state, I would be careful reintroducing your retrieved data back into a secure system as it may be infected. Just be careful.

Good luck, your work on sticks alone means you deserve all that shit recovered.