Windows – unreadable hard drive partition. is partition table corrupted

filesystem-corruptionhard drivepartitioningwindows

I have a hard drive that had 2 partitions C drive and D drive. My internet stopped responding, so I restarted my computer. However, my computer acted like it no longer recognized my C drive and that there was no operating system. I had a Windows 7 disc in the dvd drive and it automatically loaded. I tried clicking through to see what happens and it wouldn't even allow me to install on the C drive saying it was not bootable or something.

I installed another hard drive and installed Windows 7 on that. I connected my old hard drive using a usb adapter and both old C and D drives connected. D drive was accessible and I could read the files on there no problem. C drive had a popup telling me to error scan the drive. I did but nothing happened. Also, even though C drive connected (and is technically H drive now) and was visible in My Computer, I cannot see its contents. Drive properties says 0 bytes used, 0 bytes free.

Are my files still recoverable on the old C drive? Is it just the partition table being corrupted?

Best Answer

A couple ideas:

  1. Check the partition table with Testdisk : http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

  2. Try having a look from a Linux based rescue CD. e.g., http://www.sysresccd.org It should give you more information about what's actually left on the disk.

If there's anything important on the drive, you should try taking a snapshot with a utility like 'dd' before attempting data recovery. (if you've never used it, you can use it from a Linux system to copy the raw image of your drive to a file... provided you have the available storage. This will take a very long time to complete)

Good luck and be careful.

This is a sample of the output of testdisk against my own system:

TestDisk 6.13, Data Recovery Utility, November 2011
Christophe GRENIER 
http://www.cgsecurity.org

Disk /dev/sda - 640 GB / 596 GiB - CHS 77826 255 63
     Partition               Start        End    Size in sectors
>D HPFS - NTFS              0  32 33    41 254 63     672682 [SYSTEM_DRV]
 D HPFS - NTFS             41 207 39 74533 254 63 1196716966 [Windows7_OS]
 D HPFS - NTFS          74533  77 41 75492 254 63   15417509 [Lenovo_Recovery]
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