Hard Disk Damage

[cheersthanksbye]

Made a school boy error last night. Set up my desktop pc in my living room and set it up close to my washing machine (which was on a full cycle). Left the pc on, went out and when I came back it the computer had frozen. Restarted it and on booting I got the message ‘NTLDR is Missing’ and the machine goes no futher.

Thus it seems to me that my hard disk cannot be accessed – NTLDR is the part of the disk which loads Windows is it not?

Anyway, just wondering if anyone knew of the chances of recovering data off the disk and the best way to do it? Was thinking of taking the disk out of the PC chassis, loading it into another machine and 1) seeing what I can access on there (if anything) and 2) searching the net for some disk data-recovery/repair programs. Anyone know of any decent programs or indeed the best way to recover data?

Cheers in advance

[MisterGoof]

washing machine...in living room!:rollin

NTLDR is a file on the disk.
Have you tried your ERD or booting from your WIndows CD ? if the disk is usable which it sounds like it is , the either of these options should help.

[Capn Graybeard]

?

Have you tried removing the floppy disk from the drive?

[cheersthanksbye]

re

RE: Washing machine in living room.

That's open plan living for you!

Am going to try boot disks this evening. Thinking worst case however (can't read the disk) I was just wondering if anyone knew of any decent recovery apps?

[fiddleabout]

Re: re

The most likely answer has already been mentioned - you've left a floppy in it.

[xoggoth]

Re: re

If it's not the floppy but a hard disc boot sector fault, there is an undocumented /mbr option on chkdisk that I have used a couple of times to fix such problems in win98. Not sure if that still works on 2000/NT/XP but it might be worth a search on internet.

[OrangeHopper]

Re: re

There was also a well documented fault with the first version of XP which could lose hard disc boot files if the machine wasn't shutdown properly.