I recently installed Avast, as I heard it was a good anti-virus program. I havent had one installed since I reinstalled windows, and decided to give it a try. I installed it, and elected to have a boot-time scan. I rebooted, and it found a couple viruses in the system restore, and I told it to Delete All, as I didnt want to sit there the entire time. When I came back a little while later, it was sitting at the windows login screen. I logged in, and it rebooted. Now, it goes straight to a “Disk error, press ctrl alt delete to reboot” error.
I booted into recovery console, and tried fixmbr, nothing. When i look at the partition table, it still shows my 2 partitions, but that they are formatted.
I am in the process of finding an appropriate data recovery program to use, I am currently running R-Studio Emergency to see what it will come up with, and it’s finding files, however, it’s costs $79 to buy - not sure if I want to spring for it. Does anybody know any free/inexpensive tool that will do the entire drive? This R-Studio looks pretty good, but you need to call them with a hardware code to get a key generated for it to actually write to the drive.
Deleting is not the wiser way… Why didn’t you send the infections to Chest (Quarantine)?
Reinstall Windows over your actual installation.
Overinstallation can solve the problem and you won’t lose your programs, settings, data, files, etc.
Just choose ‘Repair’ installation of Windows and install ‘over’ the old installation.
I suggest a full partitioning backup and not a ‘restore’ tool on the background (like Norton Ghost).
Good partition backups could be achieved by Acronis or other free tools.
Deleting is not the wiser way... Why didn't you send the infections to Chest (Quarantine)?
I have always done that in the past. I thought it was better than quarantining, but I guess not.
Reinstall Windows over your actual installation.
Overinstallation can solve the problem and you won't lose your programs, settings, data, files, etc.
Just choose 'Repair' installation of Windows and install 'over' the old installation.
Not in this case... thats probably the worst thing I can do, its not just a corrupted installation, when I go into the recovery console, it shows it as unformatted. If I re-install windows, I would need to reformat first, which will lose any data that happens to still be there.
I suggest a full partitioning backup and not a 'restore' tool on the background (like Norton Ghost).
Good partition backups could be achieved by Acronis or other free tools.
I have 2 partitions. My windows, and my data partition (on the same harddrive). Both of them are gone, thats why I need to save this data... I have been lazy lately in my burned backups, and have been meaning to do another set for awhile (Murphy's law...)
Hmmm… something could have messed the MFT (Master File Table) or the boot sector of the partition (MBR)…
You can try to restore the MBR to the default using DOS floppy, the tool fdisk and the command /mbr
Well, do with your own risk… it will restore the boot sector and MAYBE allow to boot from that partition.
I’ve did this in the past… it worked once…
