A friend’s notebook gives an “unmountable boot volume” warning on booting up. The usual three options for continuing to boot (starting normally, in safe mode etc) simply start the process over again.
I tried putting the drive in a caddy to see if any Windows tools could help, but Windows would only recognise one of the drive’s partitions, the one without the important data on it. The other partition has a manufacturer’s recovery programme, which doesn’t help sadly.
A repair man at a big name PC store said if the drive was corrupted, it would take a rebuilding of the HD to recover the data, which would take hundreds of pounds.
My friend is keen for the data to be recovered, as it has pictures of a deceased family member, but might not have that much money to spare. Are there alternative means to repair I might attempt at home?
And yes, the benefits of frequent backups are now well understood.
Take a look at a utility called Active @ partition recovery. I haven’t used this particular utility, but I did buy Active @ undelete years ago because it was the only thing that worked out of several utils I tried for data recovery. They make good stuff and have a downloadable demo you can try to see if recovery is possible. Good luck!
I’d been trying to run chkdsk when I popped the drive in a caddy, to no avail. I don’t see an option to boot from a USB DVD drive either, but I’ll double check that again when I’m back home with the machine.
Pushkin’s friend needs to recover the partition before he can do anything else. You can’t run high level utilities on or image a partition you can’t ‘see’.
I believe FAT and NTFS keep two copies of the partition table data, so recovery may be trivial with the proper tools. Then again, it may be a lost cause without professional intervention. At least Active @partition and maybe some of Gibson’s stuff will give him a shot at it. Losing important data sucks.