Hibernation causing boot record corruption?

Hi all,
I had a very strange problem today when I was waking my machine up from hibernation. Here's my set up:

Windows 7 x64
Windows 7 is on a SSD drive
Apple Mac Pro

I also have two other drives in, one for OSX and one with an old Vista x64 on it.

I mainly work in Win 7, I never shut this computer off, I just restart sometimes. But today I put it in hibernation. When I was supposed to wake it back up the win 7 drive had just disappeared.

I booted in Vista 64 and had a look in the disk manager, it tells me that the SSD drive isn't initialized (see attached screenshot).

As you may guess I can't browse this disk, and it does not show up during boot up. I did try to start from the Win7 CD and do a recovery, but it can't find my win7 installation and so I guess I can't repair.

Does anybody have a clue what this is, and what I could try to recover? Since I can boot my old OSX and my old Vista I'm quite sure it's not the rest of the hardware, I figure it's the Win7 drive or maybe its MBR. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance!

micketeeling said:

Hi all,
I had a very strange problem today when I was waking my machine up from hibernation. Here's my set up:

Windows 7 x64
Windows 7 is on a SSD drive
Apple Mac Pro

I also have two other drives in, one for OSX and one with an old Vista x64 on it.

I mainly work in Win 7, I never shut this computer off, I just restart sometimes. But today I put it in hibernation. When I was supposed to wake it back up the win 7 drive had just disappeared.

I booted in Vista 64 and had a look in the disk manager, it tells me that the SSD drive isn't initialized (see attached screenshot).

As you may guess I can't browse this disk, and it does not show up during boot up. I did try to start from the Win7 CD and do a recovery, but it can't find my win7 installation and so I guess I can't repair.

Does anybody have a clue what this is, and what I could try to recover? Since I can boot my old OSX and my old Vista I'm quite sure it's not the rest of the hardware, I figure it's the Win7 drive or maybe its MBR. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance!

Could be HD, no hibernation file, MBR, Malware, etc. Have you tried to repair the MBR? Run Malwarebytes on the HD?

Thanks for your reply,
I just installed Malwarebytes to see if I could find anything, but it seems to just scan through the mounted drives. My drive won't mount at this point.
I'd like to try to repair the MBR, can you point me in a good direction for what to look for. I did try the route over windows recovery from Win7 Installation disc, but no go there since it can't see that this disk used to have the OS on it.
Any other program that could mess with the MBR that you can recommend?

Thanks!

micketeeling said:

Thanks for your reply,
I just installed Malwarebytes to see if I could find anything, but it seems to just scan through the mounted drives. My drive won't mount at this point.
I'd like to try to repair the MBR, can you point me in a good direction for what to look for. I did try the route over windows recovery from Win7 Installation disc, but no go there since it can't see that this disk used to have the OS on it.
Any other program that could mess with the MBR that you can recommend?

Thanks!

Unfortunately I dont have enough experience with them to recommend but there are several in a google search for MBR repair

OK, thanks, yeah I did try to google it but there are so many options and most don't seem too reliable. But I'll google away some more.
In the meantime - does anybody know what the disk manager actually DO when you initialize the disk? Would it be safe for me to try that or could that mess my disk up even more?

Hello micketeeling and welcome to Seven Forums. Have you looked through this tutorial?

MBR - Restore Windows 7 Master Boot Record

Thanks! Yeah, I've seen that but it doesn't work since my disk isn't seen by the recovery program (can't be chosen in step 3 of the tutorial). So no luck there.

I realize this is an old thread, but here's some additional info I've found to help...

You can always boot to an antivirus rescue CD and scan for viruses on all connected drives. The benefit of this would be scanning outside of the OS. I prefer to use BitDefender: Using BitDefender Rescue CD...

Also, in addition to a corrupted MBR/boot sector, this could also be a compromised BIOS. In which case, please see: How to Remove a Virus from The BIOS