Unrepairable MBR Corruption on SSD after BSOD? I'll be damned

Had a BSOD due to a BIOS change I made last night which locked and froze my system.

When it went to reboot it was like lightning hit the drive and nothing I did would fix the mbr so I ended up doing a total os reinstall losing about 1TB of data in the process....Yes I know my fault for lack of backups


Is this a normal thing to have happen ? I've never in all of my years had a mbr so corrupted it wouldn't repair.





Any way to avoid this in the future?

I assume you tried re-writing the Master Boot Record with the fdisk /mbr command as well...I can understand an MBR taking a dump. I think we've all seen it before, at least once, but it's odd that the backup copy of it would also be taken out by a BIOS change.

What operating system(s) were on the drive?
If you are talking about it not booting but the drive was recognized then we could have used EasyBCD or similar to repair that to boot okay again or simply connecting the drive to another computer would have rescued the data.

If your drive partition table was FUBARed then yes - that is rare - but we could have rescued your files from a drive with a messed up partition table like this:


http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download


Testdisk 6.14


• To recover a damaged partition table:

1. Start testdisk_win.exe

2. Create a new log file

3. Scroll down to drive which contains the damaged partition table > Proceed

4. Intel > Analyse > Quick Search

5. Should TestDisk search for partition created under Vista ? > Y


6. If the lost partition was a primary partition, move arrows to change * to P and press Enter.
[P may already be there, if it is, still go to the next step to 'Write partition table'.]

7. Move arrows to Write and press Enter.

8. Write partition table, confirm ? (Y/N) > Y

9. You will have to reboot for the change to take effect.




• To recover individual files / individual directories from a hard drive which cannot display them in Windows because of a damaged partition table:

1. Copy Testdisk to hard drive with enough space to recover the lost files/directories
then start testdisk_win.exe

2. Create a new log file

3. Scroll down to drive which contains the files/directories to recover > Proceed

4. Intel > Analyse > Quick Search

5. Should TestDisk search for partition created under Vista ? > Y


6. Instead of moving arrows to get to the letter P, physically press key P on your keyboard.
This lists the files and directories

7. Now use arrows to move down to select any file or directory and press C on keyboard to copy selected file or directory.

or

To copy all files and directories, move the arrow to the top marked with one dot: .
Then press C on keyboard and all files and directories will be copied to the location where you ran TestDisk from.



• Use instructions above to recover files/directories from a hard drive with a damaged partition table.
If partitions already exist, it may be recovered to an image file. To create an image of the entire partition:

0. Copy Testdisk to hard drive with enough space to store the image of the partition

1. Create a new folder inside which you want to save the image.dd file then start testdisk_win.exe

2. Create a new log file

3. Scroll down to drive which contains the partition to copy > Proceed

4. Intel > Advanced > Scroll down to partition to recover

5. Use right arrow to get to Image Creation > Enter

6. Select where to store the image.dd file > Press Enter then press the Y key on keyboard.

7. File image.dd will contain the recovered partition.

You can use freeware such as OSFMount to mount image.dd files to access files inside them directly.

Veeam endpoint backup is free and easy.