Invalid or incorrect entries in partition table may lead to corrupt partitions and subsequent data loss

When your hard disk is divided into partitions, all the information about these partitions is stored in the partition table which resides in the first sector of the disk. A partition table can have maximum four entries, each reserving sixteen bytes making the total size of the table to be sixty-four bytes. The partition table contain fields, such as byte offset, field length, sample value etc. It contains a unique entry for each primary or extended partition that exists on your hard disk. It might happen that your partition table contains invalid entries or all the entries point to the same location. In such situation, you may encounter several miscellaneous partition table errors making your partition data inaccessible. It can also result in overlapping of partitions. To overcome this situation, you need to go for partition recovery through a third party utility.

For instance, When you install Windows Vista on a particular disk partition, you may receive the following error message on your screen:

“Error: uncaught exception: (failed UI_ASSERT).”

Cause:

This error occurs when all the entries in the partition table are pointing to the same byte offset location.

This may render all the partitions present on your hard disk corrupt and prevent you from accessing the partition data. In such circumstances, you need to recover partition data through a backup. If you don't have an updated backup, you should follow below mentioned resolution steps.

Resolution:

To resolve this issue, you should delete all the partitions present on your hard disk and then try to install Windows Vista on your system.

This may remove all the valuable information stored in your system. In case of formatting or accidental deletion of the partition data, you can take the help of partition recovery software. These software enable lost or formatted file and folder recovery from the drive. They use powerful scanning algorithms to quicken the recovery process and enable us to preview all the recoverable files after scanning.

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is an advanced utility that recovers lost, deleted or formatted data from FAT, NTFS, and exFAT file systems. It has a feature to create an image of your hard drive or any logical volume. It can perform Windows partition recovery using that image file.