MBR got damaged while making a USB-HDD boot disk, how to recover the original... - China DOS Union Forum

My USB-HDD had 3 partitions, about 8G, 11G, and 21G respectively. Just now I tried using FlashBoot (http://www.prime-expert.com/flashboot/) to make a boot disk, but unexpectedly this software damaged the USB-HDD partition table (this damned software gave no clear warning; other brothers should use it with caution!) The last 2 partitions of my USB-HDD contain lots of software and data. How can I recover them quickly? o00u~oOo~oOo
Judging from the operation time, FlashBoot only wrote to the USB-HDD's MBR and the first partition, and did not format the other two partitions. My system is XP. I tried several Windows programs, but none was suitable. Among them, NDD32 found that the first partition had not registered all disk sectors and asked whether to correct it. I thought it could fix things, but in the end it only “enlarged” the capacity of the first partition; the result was that the whole USB drive looked like it had just been formatted as a single partition—there was no more “problem”.
I also tried several partition-operation programs under DOS, but still couldn't find a way to recover it. So now I'm asking the experts on this forum: what software should I use, and how should I operate it? Many thanks!

Floor1　o2y	Posted 2005-04-26 00:00
中级用户　Posts 51　Credits 226
My USB-HDD had 3 partitions, about 8G, 11G, and 21G respectively. Just now I tried using FlashBoot (http://www.prime-expert.com/flashboot/) to make a boot disk, but unexpectedly this software damaged the USB-HDD partition table (this damned software gave no clear warning; other brothers should use it with caution!) The last 2 partitions of my USB-HDD contain lots of software and data. How can I recover them quickly? o00u~oOo~oOo Judging from the operation time, FlashBoot only wrote to the USB-HDD's MBR and the first partition, and did not format the other two partitions. My system is XP. I tried several Windows programs, but none was suitable. Among them, NDD32 found that the first partition had not registered all disk sectors and asked whether to correct it. I thought it could fix things, but in the end it only “enlarged” the capacity of the first partition; the result was that the whole USB drive looked like it had just been formatted as a single partition—there was no more “problem”. I also tried several partition-operation programs under DOS, but still couldn't find a way to recover it. So now I'm asking the experts on this forum: what software should I use, and how should I operate it? Many thanks!

Floor2　o2y	Posted 2005-04-28 00:00
中级用户　Posts 51　Credits 226
The problem has already been solved; it was done with a “manual + DiskGen” method. Let me briefly explain the points to watch out for, for everyone's reference. 1. Conditions: the motherboard must support USB devices, and the operation must be done in a DOS environment. 2. Because the space of all 3 partitions had been assigned to 1 partition, to prevent the software from “taking shortcuts” during checking, it was necessary to clear the partition MBR records. Many partition tools can do this. 3. After booting into DOS, run DiskGen, first switch to the second hard disk (that is, the USB-HDD), then use Tools - Partition Rebuild - Automatic, and after a short while it was OK.