re-installing boot partition

Question

Some idiot techie used Acronis Disk Director and deleted an 18 Meg boot partition on my Inspiron 8200 and it wont now boot to Windows XP. I am also having problems with his having accidentally deleted my data partition but am working to resolve that if I can get into windows. I don't however want to write anything to the disc where that data partition is, - on the other side to the OS partition. Is there any way I can use (for example) the restore discs to reinstall the boot partition and put it at the beginning of the drive where there is now 18 meg of unallocated space? I cant restore the one he deleted because he overwrote some of it with some type of boot.ini file. I emphatically do NOT want to reinstall Windows though I might not be averse to doing a repair installation if this is what it takes and it wont affect either the NTFS OS partition or my data partition. I have become aware recently that you CAN use the Dell Restore discs for purposes other than destroying all your data and configurations by formatting and resetting to factory specs and that these discs WILL run (for example) SFC.

Mary G · Answer

You can boot to your Windows xp cd, go to Recovery Console and run Chkdsk  /R. After that completes with no error messages, you should run FIXBOOT to restore the MBR. Note the space before the /R switch. Then you can see if you can recover your data. Not sure what you mean by 'deleted the data partition.'

licensedtoquill · Answer

I have already run a fix mbr program and of course chkdsk a few times and have even run a program to check every sector on the drive and it found NO bad sectors on this new HDD at all.

Does your suggestion actually restore the Dell partition or add a layer to the already in place MBR or try to put another MBR there?

What I really wanted to do was to put back that 8.18 megabyte Dell emergency Partition which probably contains boot information. It was a partiton which showed at the beginning of the drive with the windows sysmgmt utility and now it shows as unallocated space. (I always get a bit worried when I see unallocated space at the BEGINNING of a drive coupled with a system which wont boot)

Windows General

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