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Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
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Invalid Partition Table

June 24th, 2011, 12:58

I had some trouble with a PC that kept rebooting itself in a continuous loop. Through Windows Recovery Console I used fixmbr, but after restarting I received the message, "Invalid Partition Table". Now I cannot boot from the disk at all nor can I read from it when connecting it to other computers using a SATA/USB cable.

What can I do to get data off of this hard drive?

Re: Invalid Partition Table

June 24th, 2011, 13:22

After the MBR fix was applied were you still getting those beeps while booting?

What model drive is this?

Re: Invalid Partition Table

June 24th, 2011, 14:26

I was not getting beeps at all. Just the message, "Invalid Partition Table," which did not appear until after I used fixmbr.

The drive is an 80GB Western Digital (WD800JD).

Re: Invalid Partition Table

June 24th, 2011, 18:46

You said "nor can I read from it when connecting it to other computers using a SATA/USB cable."

Did the drive register in Device Manager when you connected to other computers via SATA or USB?

Re: Invalid Partition Table

July 5th, 2011, 1:16

Plug the drive into another computer and run testdisk to read the drive. If testdisk finds a partition, you may write this to the drive, then reboot to see if the files are accessible.

Knoppix live USB has test disk, or you can burn the Testdisk ISO to a cd/dvd and boot from that.
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