Hard Drive Partition Table / MBR / MFT Corrupt

[zoink]

Hello everyone. I hope that you can shed some light on my problem that I have recently got into at my own stupidity.

Windows 7 was performing a disk check (CHKDSK) when I restarted it as I couldn't wait. Yeah I know, not the smartest thing to do. Anyway...

After the restart the Boot Manager said that it could not locate Windows etc etc. I then did everything from using the Repair function on the DVD to manually writing a new Boot table, but no luck.

I then installed W7 on another HDD and everything worked fine, but the HDD which it was installed previously is not wanting to format within W7 to use it as a logical drive.

In Disk Management it shows the HDD there saying that it's status is "Unknown" and the space is "Unallocated".

Initializing the HDD does nothing even when you select MBR or GPT from the pop-up window. After I press OK it still shows that is not initialized.

I went and installed utilities from Maxtor to see if they could help but no luck. I also tried other utilities such as Zero Recovery, Recover2000, TestDisk etc but no luck. Running TestDisk Deep Scan did not bring up anything only the error message "No Partitions Found" and another scan said:

Boot sector
Bad

Backup boot sector
Bad

First sectors (Boot code and partition information) are not identical.
Second sectors (cluster information) are not identical.

A valid FAT Boot sector must be present in order to access
any data; even if the partition is not bootable.


I am not trying to recover the data, all I want to is to reset the HDD and just use it as a logical drive. I just do not know how to reset/format/re-configure either the MFT, MBR or the Partition Table.

I'm guessing that the HDD is in good working order as it is detected by the BIOS and Windows, I just can't use it!


Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Antman]

In Disk Management, right click the drive and select New Simple Volume.

This will create a partition.

 

[sup3rsprt]

if that doesn't work, maybe you will have some luck with a Linux boot CD. Something like Parted Magic, Ubuntu, or Knoppix.

Any of those distributions will have a easy-to-use partition manager utility that should be able to format the disk.

 

[zoink]

Thanks for the speedy replies!

In Disk Management, right click the drive and select New Simple Volume.

This will create a partition.

The menus when right clicking are greyed out. So no luck there.

if that doesn't work, maybe you will have some luck with a Linux boot CD. Something like Parted Magic, Ubuntu, or Knoppix.

Any of those distributions will have a easy-to-use partition manager utility that should be able to format the disk.

I have GParted on a CD and I will try that when I get home and I will let you know how I get on.

Any other ideas/suggestions would be welcomed too. Thanks guys!!

 

[sup3rsprt]

You're welcome. Good luck.

I think Linux boot CD is the best way to fix it. My only other suggestion at this point would be to use dd to wipe every sector of the hard drive before formatting it. But that is probably unnecessary.

 

[zoink]

Fixed. Used GParted boot disk and created a new Partition Table then formatted it to NTFS.

Annoying how I couldn't do this in Windows.


Thanks for your help guys.