A colleague has brought her laptop in as it wont boot. It was giving her a message saying “Operating System not found”
I can see the HDD in the BIOS, but it wont boot.

I taken it out of her machine and popped it into my work machine, checked in the disc manager and its not initialised and shows as Unallocated. It will let me initilise it, but its asking what partition style to use, MBR or GPT, so I havent done anything yet. if I initialise it will that change any of the data on it?
Its a 500Gb drive and shows 465.76Gb as unallocated space. Is it basically a blank disc?

HELP please!

Stop now!

would be my advice.

from the questions you’re asking I think you’re likely to make things worse not better.

if there’s unbacked up data on there she wants to keep I suggest getting it to someone who *really* knows what they’re doing.

Hence why Im asking before she loses any data.

she loses any data.

There’s a good chance it’s gone (short of expensive/time consuming recovery).

As wwaswas – stop now. Get someone with expertise.

TBH at this stage I’d be getting a new drive, restoring a backup and then wiping and binning the duff one.

Harsh I know, but I have little to no sympathy to those that don’t maintain backups, at the very least an occasional copy of stuff to an external HDD.

First thing to check for with “OS not found” is whether there’s a CD or USB pendrive been left in the machine.

You’ll be prompted to “initialize” the disk if it can’t find an existing partition table on the disk. Initialising will create a new, blank partition table. Ie, all other things being equal, you’ll lose all the data on the disk. So don’t do that.

There are a number of reasons why it might present like this, not all of which indicate an inherent fault with the drive. I think what I’d do is put it back where it came from and see what I could see from a Linux live CD.

Harsh I know, but I have little to no sympathy to those that don’t maintain backups, at the very least an occasional copy of stuff to an external HDD.

It is harsh, but given the frequency at which this question gets asked, I’m right there with you. It must crop up at least once a month if not once a week, and this is a mountain bike forum.

Data recovery is difficult, time-consuming and expensive. Backups are trivial. Cougar’s Second Law of IT: Save regularly, save often.

Not looking good, as no backups. 😐

Thanks Cougar. I havent done anything with the drive and just put it back together for now.
She now tells me its been playing up for a couple of weeks, not booting initially, but a hard off and on seemed to get it going, but she just ignored it!

Not looking good, as no backups

Will there be next time? Something good’s come of it if so, at least.

boot form a windows cd and do an mbr repair. also data recovery doesn’t have to be expensive, just need time and a liitle clue.

Don’t do that either.

If a second machine can’t find a partition table then rewriting the MBR isn’t going to do jack.

If you’re going to send it for professional data recovery, the less you write to the disk and generally bugger about with it, the easier it’ll be to recover. OnTrack (or what ever they’re called these days) are good, and you’ll probably get change out of a grand.

I repeat: stop now and hand it to someone who knows what they’re doing.

Two reasons;

1) you don’t want to get the blame if she loses all her data.

2) you’ll get conflicting advice on here and I don’t think you’re able to decide which is the best.

Not trying to cause offence to you, honest.

Its all packed away now and I think thats it from my perspective.

Its ok wwaswas i know it wasnt. 😉

Make an image of the damaged HDD (on an external HDD) and then try to recover data from the image ?

There are tools that can locate and restore damaged and missing partition tables; which might be enough to rescue the data. I’ve used http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk successfully a number of times; however it’s not the easiest to use; so beware if you aren’t massively tech savvy. Where are you ? might be someone on here that can help you out (I’m happy to help/advise if you’re near leeds)

I was just about to suggest TestDisk. I used this recently when I accidentally overwrote my partition table – but then I knew that it was only the partition table that was damaged.

It’s definitely worth a shot though. AFAIK it does come with instructions – you need to understand a bit about partitions and so on but not much, and I’m sure we’ll help you 🙂 TestDisk won’t mess anything up until you click through several are-you-sures – first thing it does is to read the disk and show you what it found.

Full instructions on the website too.

Where abouts are you based bigyinn? May be able to recommend you someone good locally.

No offence to anyone above, but some of the advice so far is not best practice. Messing about with Testdisk/MBR will risk changing things on the disk and may make things worse.

If you do want to find someone who knows what they are doing IT-wise, then Photorec (from the same place as Testdisk) does pretty much the same sort of data-carving as the “pro” tools such as Encase/Testdisk. The only things a paid-for firm offer on top of that (apart from hopefully guaranteeing they know what they are doing) is likely to be fixing broken firmware/PCB or full-on clean lab work with replacing the heads etc which is likely to be mega-bucks and may well not succeed.

If you are by any chance near Cambridge I can help out, and provide credentials if wanted…

Thanks for your kind offer apj, but I fear the Isle of Wight is not what you’d call local to you!