… of the NTFS boot record. One at the beginning of the NTFS volume, one at the end.
http://www.heavygravity.com/2007/01/24/easily-restore-a-corrupt-ntfs-boot-sector/
“Could not find a valid backup boot sector”
Pah.
I found a recovery boot disk, it came with TestDisk 6.6.
- Recover boot sector
- search mft
- Rebuild Boot Sector
No go. hmmm…
Downloaded 6.9
executable binary. Nice.
An exhaustive search using the tool found the second file table. I was able to write out the partition table, although the machine still won’t boot. Given this machine evolved from chaos more than being intelligently partitioned, and the resulting partition table doesn’t look quite right, I’m going to back up the contents of the drive onto that little 250GB notebook drive I just picked up before I go any further.*
This’ll take a while.
* yes, I know I should have taken a dd of the drive before doing anything…
