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Had a system crash and need hard drive recovery?

Ok so your system refuses to boot up and you suspect that the day has come when you have to rake your brain about hard drive recovery. In the unfortunate event of you not having a backup of all your important data, instead of panicking and messing up there area few things that you can try out to see if you can rescue your hard drive. If you are well versed with the way hard drives store data then its easier to understand and even attempt a successful hard drive recovery.

More often than not, when the hard drive refuses to work, it is due to corrupted data and not due to mechanical or electrical problems with the hard drive. To be more specific, the corrupted data in something called the master boot record makes it impossible for the operating system to boot.

Master Boot Record (MBR) and its role in hard drive recovery

Master Boot Record is that part of the hard drive which tells the operating system (like Windows) what to boot and from where to boot. Master Boot Record is created by the file system (read FAT 16/32, NTFS, etc.) in the first sector of the hard drive and can get corrupted due to several factors.

Some of the easy and common ways in which a master boot record gets corrupted are improper shut downs due to power failures or system crashes and attacks by viruses or worms that mess around with the master boot record and the boot sector of the hard disk with the intent of paralyzing the whole system.

How to fix the MBR for a successful and quick hard drive recovery?

As the first step of your hard drive recovery attempt, get a clean, uninfected bootable floppy. If you haven't already made a bootable floppy, get any of you friend to do it for you. Most of the Windows operating systems (OS) have standard procedures for making a boot floppy. Use your OS's manual instructions if you have any doubts.

After you make a boot floppy, set the first boot device in your BIOS boot parameters as floppy disk drive. Now the system will automatically use the floppy to boot into the command prompt of the good old disk operating system (DOS). Use the chkdsk (check disk) DOS command to do a read only scan of the boot partition. Do not give any additional parameters or switches to fix the errors found on the disk, because the process of fixing errors involves writing data on to the disk and this could jeopardize future hard drive recovery operations.

After the read only scan, check disk will tell you if the master boot record is corrupted. If the master boot record is corrupted and the there are no bad sectors, then you can safely go ahead and do a normal scan with the fix errors automatically switch. If there are bad sectors, then it is better to get your hardware supplier or service agent to fix the problem for a minor charge.