Bad Partion table NEED HELP

[Urban_Squrill]

Ok first out of the blue my compter turns off all by its self. Then I go to turn it back on and when it goes to log in it reboots. So i get out the good old XP cd go to reinstall I delete the partion(already backed up the stuff). I go to install on that partion and it says it is not a compatable format for XP or some stuff like that. So after a few house messin with it I finaly take out one of my hard drives(with backup on it) and it works fine. When I hook it back up it does not boot and gives me a error about a bad partion table. I have fixed it eforce but cant remember how. How can i repair this with out formating that drive?

[ArcticFox]

You narrowed down the problem, that's the first part.

What I would do next is attempt to wire that HD up to another PC as a 2nd drive if you have one, or go to the library and do it so if it breaks theirs no big problem .

Other then that, theirs not a lot you can do unless someone else has ideas. Maybe if you got a big, strong magnet and completely obliterated any traces of a partition table you would be able to succesfully hook it back up without errors, and reformat from their. Please note, I'm not joking. Find a magnet and start zapping!

Did you refresh the mbr on all drives?

If not, boot from a win98se bootdisk and at a: type fdisk /mbr. This will not corrupt/damage anything but refresh/rewrite your boot drive mbr.

Next, do it for the other drive. This is an undocumented DOS command:

fdisk /cmbr 0 or fdisk /cmbr /1

This will only fix your mbrs. Just try it and see if it works. If it doesn't and your data drive becomes inaccessable, you will need to use some utility to recover the data.

You can download a demo utility here and see if it helps.

[Urban_Squrill]

Ya I cant loose the data on this drive for anyreason. It has more then 5 years of stuff on it. Things that can not be gotton again
ever.