How to "recover" a missing volume?

[Jimwdavis]

XP System would not boot. Purchased ZAR, ran and I believe I have saved all the data to another drive. I still need to fix the original drive to reinstall into it's computer. The MBR looks valid but the Partition Table does not. Nor does the backup location look valid (assuming I am looking in right place). Ran "missing Voumes scan" and it found the NTFS volume. What do I do now? Is there a way for ZAR to fix this HDD so that it boots XP as before short of reformatting it? ZAR seems to detect all the "pieces" but it is not clear what to do with them to put humpty dumpty together again. If I just should reformat and go from there, let me know. Thanks for any assistance you can provide.

[Alexey V. Gubin]

ZAR does not fix damaged disks, it just extracts data.

For a fix, a reliable way would be to format and reinstall (provided that the data is copied somewhere).

A less reliable would be to boot from the XP installation CD and use the Recovery Console - attempt to make a volume bootable. This involves FIXMBR, FIXBOOT and then CHKDSK. However, this may or may not work, depening on the damage.

References:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058
http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/wxprcons.html - this is for Windows 2000 but generally the console is the same between 2000 and XP.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307654 - console command reference.

[Jimwdavis]

Thanks for your response Alexey.

I started with recovery console but it does not even get off the ground.

So when I re-format, if afterwards I take what I saved from the analysis/recovery run (I checked Root and saved all 54+ GB to another HDD) and copied it back on to the re-formatted drive, it would work? If so this would imply that ZAR produced a "clone" copy during it's recovery. This would be GREAT!

Or am I really going to have to reinstall all the programs and then copy over my recovered data files? Ok....but not as great as above.

So which is it?

In any event, assuming you work for ZAR, I am very pleased with my purchase and appreciate your assistance!

[Alexey V. Gubin]

Sadly but it is full-blown reinstall. ZAR is not capable of producing an exact image (in most cases at least).