There are times when the operating system may not recognize the correct partitioning of the hard drive.
This may be due to a virus overwriting the original partition record, an accidental ‘fdisk’, operating system anomaly, software anomaly any other of a million reasons. We do have a solution though, that may be able to bring back access to your data.
NOTE: This function of Recover It All Partition Repair Data Recovery Software will WRITE data to sectors of the hard drive. Anytime that a write is performed there is a possibility for more corruption, so use this function only in emergencies. You may also want to clone the hard drive first with something like Speed Clone, so that you always have a back up of your data in its current state.
Rebuild Partition Record For Data Recovery
Under the ‘Utilities’ menu option click on the menu item which displays ‘Build Partition Record’. You will be presented with a dialog box, similar to the one you are viewing now.
There are several fields that need some explanation. They are as follows.
- Start Head, Start Sector, Start Cylinder:
These three fields are the starting delimiter for the partition. On a single partitioned drive the normal parameters are 0, 1, 0 respectively. That is, start head 0, start sector 1, and start cylinder 0. You will use this most of the time unless you have some type of diagnostic partition, or boot handler. - End Head, End Sector, End Cylinder:
These three fields are the other side of the coin, or the ending delimiter for the partition. On a single partitioned drive the normal parameters are 254, 63, 1023 respectively. That is, end head 254, end sector 63, end cylinder 1023. Once again you will use these most of the time unless you have some type of weird inverted, upside down sideways configuration which would change the sector, or head count.
One note here, the ending head will never exceed 254, the ending sector will never exceed 63, and the ending cylinder will almost never exceed 1023. - Reserved Sectors:
This field’s value is the total sectors from the partition record to the boot record, where the boot record is considered the actual beginning of the partition, otherwise known as the logical drive. On a single partitioned drive this is normally 63 sectors. If you have a multiple partition hard drive this value will vary greatly. - Total Sectors:
In order to figure out if you have the correct total sectors you will need to get out your trusty calculator and do a little math. To properly report the total sectors on a drive partition you multiply the heads, times the sectors, times the cylinders minus the reserved sectors. You can find this information but clicking the little plus sign next to physical data and then the plus sign next to geometry.
I am running the software on a Maxtor 6Y120P0 (120 gigabyte) hard drive the heads are 255, the sectors are 63 and the cylinders are 14946. That gives you 240107490 sectors, minus the 63 reserved sectors for a final tally of 240107426 sectors for a single partitioned drive.
- LBA Sector:
This field connotes where to place you newly configured partition. On a single partitioned drive the LBA sector will be 0. - Bootable:
This little check box is very important. Without marking the partition as bootable the boot code will not execute, and your computer will just hang. However, only mark the partition bootable if it is the primary, and boot partition.
Now that we have all of the fields filled in, we can send our partition sector to the hard drive. Just click on the ‘Write’ button.
You will receive a warning telling you that you are writing to the hard. Ignore said warning if you TRULY want to write the boot record. If you have any questions, please feel free to call technical support:
Toll Free 1-866-438-6932 or direct 1-727-345-9665.
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You can download the demo for Recover It All here.
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[…] Now I apply a template to the partition sector so that I can look at it “decoded”. In here we see that the partition sector says I have only 1 partition on the drive (this is correct). In the one partition it is not active (this is correct since it is an external USB drive). The start head, start sector, and start cylinder will read 1,1,0 in MOST cases. The Partition Type Indicator tells us what kind of partition we have, in my case 07 which means NTFS. If You have0b in there is means you have a FAT32 partition, which we are seeing a lot of on the external USB/FireWire drives. Next you have the end head, end sector, end cylinder and again in MOST cases it is going to be 254,63,1023. The next field is Sectors proceeding partition, this means how many sectors is it until this partition starts. You will sometimes hear this referred to as the logical off set. Again in MOST cases this is going to be 63, which means that if we go to sector 63 we should find the “boot sector” (I will go over the boot sector at a later date). Sectors in Partition is the last thing in the list, and it is exactly what it says, the total sectors in that partition. Now how do we figure out if that number is correct? You can go to the blog I wrote Building Partition Record with Recover It All. […]