Need help recovering data

[smeagol108]

We had a pc that would not boot last week. Message immediately after bios screen: error loading os.

Chkdsk would not work as the drive was seen as raw.

The drive seems to be physically fine as we have ran spinrite on the drive and it had no problems.

We need to not only recover the data, but most importantly need to be able to get the drive to boot, or put data on another drive and then be able to boot off of it. We do not want to simply recover data, we need it to be a working drive as close to the original as possible. After hooking the drive up to another pc as a slave, if you click on it, it says it needs to be formatted. We used zar and went through the discovery of files and it looks to have found everything, but we do not want to just copy it to another location, because we need it to boot.
Thanks

Oh yea, system is win xp, was ntfs. We really need some help.

[Alexey V. Gubin]

When it prompts you to format, DO NOT format. It is always a good idea to have a clone or an image of the disk before you start (however, imaging the large disk may take a while; and you need lots of storage space).

Was it a dynamic or a basic disk, if you can remember?

Check this tutorial - http://www.z-a-recovery.com/recover-ntfs-backup-boot-sector.htm
You need to proceed as described in there. Several times throughout the text, it is mentioned that you should stop if certain conditions are not met. These notes are there for reason - if it says stop, you stop.

Be sure to take screenshots as you go through these steps (press Alt+PrintScreen and paste into whatever graphics editor you use). We will need the following screenshots to start thinking:

partition table
primary (not backup) boot sector
backup boot sectorIf things seem reasonably close to the example in the tutorial, you can proceed with the actual recovery - i.e. write the backup boot sector over the primary one. If in doubt, stop and post screenshots, so I can check what goes on.

If you decide to go, and the volume becomes mountable once a boot sector is restored, make sure that you

immediately run CHKDSK on it WITHOUT the /F swith - NO WRITES.
if CHKDSK is not happy with the volume, post its report here.
do not attempt to boot unless CHKDSK comes out clean
since we do not know what the originating problem was, I suggest that you avoid putting the drive back to the original system unless its hardware is tested with no anomaly (be sure to test memory).In case something is not clear, do not hesitate to ask for a clarification.
If in doubt, stop and post more details.

[smeagol108]

Thanks will do this at work tommorow and will post back then. The drive was a basic drive. It has some propriatary apps and data on it, so it would be much easier if we could just make it usable again then if we would have to start all over for this drive. I have already ghosted the drive to another (even though its raw) just so we would have a backup for data recovery if necessary. It seems the originating cause had to do with the business (our customer) always powering down the computer like 3 times a day since we gave to them like 3 years ago. We were unaware she was constantly powering it on and off until the problem arose and she told us that she turns it off multiple times a day, b/c she likes to sleep and the fan keeps her awake. (thought youd get a laugh out of that, real productive employee). She powered it on one day after lunch and whoala she gets error loading os. Seems like her hardware is alright though we checked that out already.