Windows 7 MBR Gone can it be recovered

[stormchaser]

A friend of mine lost the Master Boot Record off his Dell Inspiron laptop, can it be recovered & if so how, its his business comp & has important stuff on it ?

 

[Saltgrass]

Your description is a little confusing, could you confirm the following? You lost the ability to read the Hard Drive but need to recover the files on it.

Is this a boot drive? How did he loose the MBR? How does the drive show in Disk Management?

If he really lost the MBR, you would not be able to see the drive's configuration, so no partitions would show. If this is the case, using something like Partition Wizard bootable version may be able to recover the partition information.

 

[MikeHawthorne]

Hi

We could use a little more information.

Are you saying that the computer won't boot?
How do you know that the master boot record is missing?

If the computer has important data on it that can't be lost, one thing you could do is create a bootable Ubuntu DVD using another computer, so that you can boot the computer and back up the files to disks or an external hard drive.

Once the data is safe you can work on restoring the computer but you don't want to risk losing the files.

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop

Once that's done you could restore the computer, either by resetting it to factory state or doing a restore.

Do you have a Windows install disk?

http://www.heidoc.net/joomla/technology-science/microsoft/14-windows-7-direct-download-links

https://neosmart.net/wiki/recovering-windows-bootloader/

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/3413-repair-install.html

Mike

I hate to sound like a broken record but everyone should have an image backup of their operating system drive.
Especially business computers.

This can be done with free software and almost any OS problems or virus infestations can be fixed within an hour without losing data.

I use EaseUS TODO Backup.
It's easy to use and has always worked for me when I needed it.

 

[stormchaser]

Your description is a little confusing, could you confirm the following? You lost the ability to read the Hard Drive but need to recover the files on it.

Is this a boot drive? How did he loose the MBR? How does the drive show in Disk Management?

If he really lost the MBR, you would not be able to see the drive's configuration, so no partitions would show. If this is the case, using something like Partition Wizard bootable version may be able to recover the partition information.

 

[stormchaser]

When he turns it on this is what is on the screen. Click on the picture to make it bigger

 

[MikeHawthorne]

Hi

If he hasn't been inside his computer and disconnected something, this could indicate hard drive failure.
Have you tried the options listed on the screen?

How old is the computer?

If you feel able, open the case and check the connections on the hard drive (unplug, plug).

Funny (or not I guess), but my wife recently had the same thing on her Dell laptop).
It turned out to be dead.

If you have the capabilities try plugging the hard drive into another computer and see if it's readable.
If it is copy all the important data from it.

You could still try the Ubuntu disk too, but if the drive is really unreadable it may not show to Ubuntu either.

Otherwise I'm not sure what else you can do, without diagnostic tools.
But maybe someone else has another approach.

Mike

 

[stormchaser]

Hi,
He has tried all of the above, but I'm not sure about the Ubuntu disk, I will tell him in the morning to try that & hopefully that works.
Thanks
Stay tuned, lol