Marc,
Thats not always the case, although by now anyone who isnt backing up or cloning their drive is in need of serious mental help..
The MBR can be corrupt but the rest of the drive is fine.
If the partition tables are stuffed that can be more difficult.
I had a MBR problem recently on my work WinPc.
Cloned the faulty drive to another drive using a cheap USB to IDE/SATA/etc etc external adapter just in case before I attempted to rebuild the MBR. (I bought two of these so its easier cloning from one external drive straight to another external drive)
The PC wouldnt boot but the local drive data and apps were all still there - intact and could be file copied if necessary, but I really didnt want to go through the hassle of reinstalling everything and configuring it all as well - there was a week of work involved in doing that !
The adapter was like this one
http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/USB-2-0-t...cAAOSwe7BWt-fw
The beauty is you dont need a HDD case or external drive or power supply - it has everything - all you need is the internal HDD drive and it can be pretty much any type of drive you like.
Fixed the MBR using a free downloaded software tool and all was well again - I then had two working drives !
Total time spent was about 2 hours which included removing the hard drive from the case and replacing it and searching and downloading the MBR repair tool, firing up the laptop to do the cloning and using the USB/HDD adapters for the first time.
The problem was Windows doesnt get the chance to really understand what was wrong, so its diagnostics/attempts were futile.
In saying this was an earlier OS than Win8, so things are a bit different.
Rally
Quote:
Originally Posted by multiweb
It sounds like your HD MBR (master boot record) might have got corrupted. When an OS stops working from one day to the other and you get these kind of issues it is very unlikely it is a Windows problem. Windows recovery tools are pretty good and the OS has some redundancy built into it.
The only way to deal with issues like this is to have a clone/image of your HD so you can do a bare metal restore. Even if you managed somehow to fix the problem your HD cannot be relied on. Might do the same thing again in the near future.
|
anyway from this point on it is going to the Puter Shop. 
you have all be most helpful.
