First did you look at the drive with a disk editor like Winhex? If not give it a look.
Inspect sector 0. Use the MBR template in the Template manager to view available partitions, if there is any. If there are partitions listed, check to see if the large one is 07h (NTFS). If there are no partitions listed, then the Partition/MBR Sector has been rewritten. I almost went though rewriting the partition table. Since its a long process and takes some math, I will not go into it. If your clients wants the data recovered use RStudio R-Tools to recover the data. If you want a professional to work on it let me know. Tim Lider Data Recovery Specialist Advanced Data Solutions, LLC maito: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Joe User Sent: Monday, August 11, 2008 9:14 AM To: The Hardware List Subject: [H] No recovery discs or partitions Hello, Have a guy that brought in his Wal-Mart sold HP/Crapaq laptop. He tells me he was surfing pr0n and got a message that his system was infected and he just shut down his system and called me. I asked him if this was possibly a pop up ad and he doesn't think it was. However, he doesn't know if the AV was working or even current. The system is around 6 - 7 months old. It has Vista Home Premium OEM on the COA. I took the drive out and tried to access it and as soon as Windows explorer tries to access it asks me to format it. I am using Win2K Pro to do this but last I knew Vista had WinFS left out so I assume it uses NTFS or at least FAT32. So I should be able to read it. I can only assume the drive got wiped out. The problem now is he didn't get any discs with it and since the drive is wiped out the recovery partition is also gone. I would try to recover the file system but I am thinking maybe it would be better to start from scratch. I had never seen this kind of damage from a infection though but he denies any other issues with the unit, no grinding noises to make me suspect HDD issues. Since I only have a copy of Vista Business upgrade (ala MAPS) I guess all I can do is ask for a recovery disc from HP/Crapaq? -- Regards, joeuser - Still looking for the 'any' key... -- Tim "The Beave" Lider E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] MSN: [EMAIL PROTECTED] AIM: dowbeave
