Fixing the MTF or MBR?

[HeNry2kOoL]

When I was swapping out my motherboard with a Via chipset to an Abit IS7 with an Intel, I tried booting Windows up on my HD and it led to a blue screen of death. I suspected that after that it trashed my entire MTF (Master Table File) or MBR (Master Boot Record). I had to install WinXP on my spare drive that I have. Then I tried putting the drive with the bad MTF as slave and Windows automatically ran chkdsk on it upon booting to Windows. I pretty much let chkdsk do the recovery and fixing only to find that most of my executable files in that drive were corrupted and unopenable, and 20GB of data out of 150GB were missing. There were bits and pieces of files missing all over. I then tried to reinstall Windows XP on it and it only went as far as copying the installation files to the hard drive, when it auto rebooted the drive would just sit there after being detected. When I ran chkdsk again it gave me no errors. Doing the fixboot and fixmbr in the Recovery Console in the WinXP CD didn't do anything. When I ran the NTFSCHK program that came with NTFSDOS, it said I have a corrupted Master Table File and couldn't start the scan. I would like to be able to reinstall WinXP on the drive and still preserve the data that I have left in it. Until I can find someone that has a hard drive to spare with that amount of capacity, I cannot format. Does anyone have any ideas on what I can do or how I can fix the MTF or MBR?

 

[dark_15]

The chipset switch is what caused your BSOD. The easy way to fix it was to run a repair install and it would delete the C:\windows directory and preserved your data...

Probably the best thing to do now is to format it or try and copy data off ti by booting up with a sperate xp install on a seperate hard drive. Then format the sucker...

 

[HeNry2kOoL]

Yeah that's the problem, I can't even reinstall Windows. The installation would only get pass the first part, which is copying the installation files to the hard disk and then auto re-boot into the setup interface. But the problem is after the auto re-boot, the hard drive would just hang there and doesn't boot into the setup. It seems that no matter what I do the MTF or MBR always stay corrupted. When I run Windows XP off of my spare drive and with my other drive on slave, it would read the drive fine and I can browse through my files. I know a format would be able to fix it, but unfortunately I don't have anything that I can backup to with that amount of capacity. Only thing I can really do right now is try to fix the MTF/MBR without doing a format, so I can at least get Windows reinstalled.

 

[dark_15]

I would keep the spare drive running windows XP until you can purchase a dvd burner or spare drive to move you stuff off. Does one of your friends/coworkers have a spare drive that you could borrow temporarily?

 

[HeNry2kOoL]

I'll have to ask around and see if any of my friends have a hard drive with enough free space for me to backup on. I already have a DVD-burner, but that would take at least 20 DVDs to backup my data and would take a lot of time considering I only have 2x DVD-Rs. Really it's amazing what one little mistake can do, something that took merely a second to happen costed 20GB worth of data along with many corrupted programs and many frustrations. I think my other mistake was letting Windows auto chkdisk run which probably did even more damage than good. If I had done a Repair through the Windows XP CD after I installed the new motherboard, none of this would've probably happened.

 

[dark_15]

Trying to move that MTF is what probably corrupted and killed your data. O well... at least you learned a little from it...

I had chkdsk attempt to fix my hard drive on a lappy.... and then when I tried to partition it with Partition Magic, it corrupted the drive and gave me a lovely BSOD... o well, I guess I got burned...