Aeric Poon

I was trying to root my HTC Desire HD phone again last week and end up I accidentally overwrote my harddisk first 171 lines in sector 0 which mean I corrupted my Windows boot sector. I was creating a Goldcard with an SD card using HxD Hex Editor, instead of selecting Removable Disk 1, I selected Hard Disk 1!

My windows still running normally after I write the sector, until I shutdown and boot up! The screen shows a blinking cursor after the BIOS screen. Then I know I have done a big mistake.

I try using Ubuntu Linux 10.04 live cd to boot my system. Luckily I am still able to access all of my files in C: and D:. It means I am not completely damage the filesystem. I am thinking that I still have hope to recover my windows installation.

I try booting with Win 7 setup DVD to use repair tools. First the tool prompt me the tool is not supported because of different version. It means I cannot use a Win7 32bit DVD (System Repair Disk or Installation DVD) to repair to repair my current Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit. I then successful repair the startup problem but when I reboot, the problem is not solved. The cursor is still blinking. I retry the steps and the recovery tool marked my Windows 7 installation as (recovered) but yet the windows is unable to boot up.

I get a Win7 64 bit installation DVD to try again using the repair tool but again meet no success. I know I have an ultimate way, by using my system recovery image or DVD but my partition will be overwritten and all my current settings and installed programs on C: will be lost. I will need to make backup (200GB+) but I don’t have spare external drives or extra harddisk space to do so. Backup and Restore are not an ideal way to choose unless I really have no choice. Alternately, I can reinstall a new Windows installation but my old user settings and programs would not work correctly after the installation. So this is not a good option too.

Windows 7 setup DVD is good in the sense that I can access my harddisk partitions, CD/DVD optical drive or even my USB drive. To load recovery image or driver, it also allow to access network drive. I also can do basic file operations such as delete, copy and paste files. This is very useful if you want to backup your files if you meet a situation like what I was facing (when the windows unable to boot up) if you don’t want to use a Linux live cd.

Then I just try my luck with command line by typing  fixboot and fixmbr but these 2  commands are not supported. It only works during I fix Win XP last time with try and error. I continue to explore any available tools in the recovery and CD. The situation now is my computer is having the drive C: (recovery), D: (Data – original is my D:), E: (OS – original is my C:) and F: (DVD Drive) and if I not mistaken I have an X: too. Try executing some *.exe program such as repair tool with GUI using the command line but still no success. Then it just happen that I come to the “boot” directory in the DVD and i found a bootsect command. A fast reading on the command using help parameter (by typing bootsect /help) I am going to try my luck. So I type the following command:

F:\boot>bootsect /nt60 E: /mbr

The command says the bootcode is updated successfully. Typing exit and restart the computer without booting the DVD, and voila my windows has come back!