Retrieve Lost Hard Drive Partition Due To MBR Corruption

Master Boot Record (MBR) is the boot sector on a hard drive with Windows-based partitions containing information on the primary partition. MBR is primarily used to boot Windows after BIOS passes execution of complex code in the MBR and uniquely identifies the disk media. MBR is prone to corruption, and if it’s corrupted, the system will not boot anymore. Corruption or damage in MBR can occur for several reasons such as malicious virus, operating system failure, unexpected system shutdown etc. Whatever be the reason behind MBR corruption, it results in the complete inaccessibility of your valuable data in the hard drive. The best way to overcome such corruption is to run fixmbr repair command. But, if the fixmbr command is unable to repair the corrupted MBR and the hard drive partition remains inaccessible, then you need professional partition recovery software to retrieve important data.

This can be explained in more detail take a scenario in real time, when the user enters the following error message:

"Invalid or damaged bootable Partition"

This error message appears when you start Windows XP system. After the error message above occurs, you can not use the information stored on the hard disk partition on your system. Furthermore, the same error message appears every time you try to boot your Windows XP system. This clearly indicates that the error message above is the result of MBR corruption.

Some tips that can solve the above error message, so that you can access data stored on your Windows XP partition,

• First of all, restart your system and try to boot from the Windows XP set-up disk.
• Enter the BIOS setup, if Windows fail to load automatically and set the first boot preference as CD drive.
• When the setup loads, an option will come that asks you to Press “R”, so that the repairing process can be carried out.
• After loading-up of the Recovery Console, choose the option, that refers to Windows installation and then enter the Administrator password.
• Enter fixmbr at the prompt. This will change the corrupt Master boot record with a new one. Now you will be able to boot your computer easily.
• You can also execute the ‘fixboot’ command for repairing the boot sector.

Make sure when using these commands only single operating system is installed on the hard drive. "Fixmbr" and "fixboot" does not work properly if you have more than one operating system is installed on your system.

If these two commands do not resolve the above error message, then you can use an updated backup to restore your data back. However, if backup is also not available, then there is only one option left, that is the re-installation of the Windows XP operating system.

But re-installation will make all the saved data inaccessible. In such situations, you have an option of third party partition recovery software. These tools scan formatted hard drive partition by high-end scanning procedures and recover all lost files and folders.