MELTDOWN....quite seriously...

[wolfrogers]

A friend of mine brought her laptop to me today. It's a Gateway with the fancy system restore partition and such on it. Apparently, there was something going wrong with her XP Media Center, so she decided that she wanted to re-install the system. The only problem was; she no longer has the restore discs that were made when the laptop was new. She likes to think that she's computer savy, so instead of coming to me earlier, she proceeded to un-hide the restore partition and quite literally start ripping it apart in an effort to get it to install somehow. What I've got on my hands to attempt to fix now is a Gateway laptop with a 120GB HDD that is shredded. Boot sectors are tore up, partitions are expanded, overlapping and altogether exploded. It looks like the restore partition decided that it was going to self-destruct because she was messing with it too much. I'm currently running the machine through a few data recovery, boot sector repair and partition rebuilding programs and scripts. Just wondering if anyone out there might be able to give me some insight as to how this may have happened and what possible routes I might take in repairing the system...IF it can be repaired without wiping and doing a completely clean install of XP or perhaps even replacing the HDD. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[Quark]

Hi wolfrogers
I cant think of anything that youre not already doing.
Im glad I went through my "search & destroy" faze with Win 3.11/95/98, much quicker to clean install back then. ;)

[jlreich]

If there is a restore partition there shouldn't be any disks. Usually with restore partitions there is a prompt at the BIOS splash screen to enter recovery mode. I honestly don't remember how gateway does their recovery procedure but usually there is no disks needed with restore partitions.

But if she went in there and messed with the data it may not work. It's worth a try. If not then a clean install of your OS is about the only way to go at this point. No need for a new hard drive though if all she did was destroy the data.

[wolfrogers]

Once again, ****** Boot CD, the most wonderful set of tools ever, has saved the day. Thanks to a utility on the 9.3 version called DIYDataRecovery Diskpatch, everything is going to be fine. Not only was it able to get the drive itself readable again, but it was able to restore the recovery partition. It even ended up putting it right so that it booted right up and was ready to make another set of recovery discs again like when it was first started up. Thanks for the input though. :D

[wolfrogers]

Computer is a Gateway laptop...friend brought it to me with windows problems. I found a few bugs of various sorts, was unable to wipe the little buggers off, so I tried to use the recovery partition. That didn't work at all, so I went ahead and wiped the drive. After putting a clean install of XP on the thing, it started up and ran alright until I did the updates. After the updates and installing a few programs, it went nuts and loads Media Player when most any programs are told to run...either when the system is opening them or if I try and run them. It will run .bat files without issue, but the .exe's are a problem. It will -not- let me get into the registry, but I can play around with msconfig and system services. After trying to clear things up within windows for a bit, I rebooted and loaded up my ****** boot cd. Any HDD utilities are stopped in their tracks and not allowed to access the HDD, but I can still load some of the other utilities as long as they don't involve anything to do with windows system settings. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

[wolfrogers]

Just got into the registry through the windows client on the ****** cd...finding some things that I've never seen before. So I think I'm going to switch this post over to the 'Windows' thread. Will keep an eye out here though in case anybody happens to have any idea that it -might- be hardware.

[wolfrogers]

Computer is a Gateway laptop...friend brought it to me with windows problems. I found a few bugs of various sorts, was unable to wipe the little buggers off, so I tried to use the recovery partition. That didn't work at all, so I went ahead and wiped the drive. After putting a clean install of XP on the thing, it started up and ran alright until I did the updates. After the updates and installing a few programs, it went nuts and loads Media Player when most any programs are told to run...either when the system is opening them or if I try and run them. It will run .bat files without issue, but the .exe's are a problem. It will -not- let me get into the registry, but I can play around with msconfig and system services. After trying to clear things up within windows for a bit, I rebooted and loaded up my H****'s boot cd. Any HDD utilities are stopped in their tracks and not allowed to access the HDD, but I can still load some of the other utilities as long as they don't involve anything to do with windows system settings. After posting this in the hardware section, I'm reposting here because I just got into the registry and am finding some things that I've never seen before...
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Local AppWizard-Generated Applications\MMDiag\Settings[No entries]
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\RegEdt32\Sett ings[AutoRefresh--1, ConfirmOnDelete--1, ReadOnly--0, RemoteAccess--0, SaveSettings--1]
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\SQMClient\wmp \Sampling[0--(Hex code)]
There are several others that I'm not sure about, but I'll just list these couple that caught my attention. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[Paul Komski]

Thread's Merged since all three appear to be related. The registry changes could be malware and if you use warez don't be surprised. It seems you have now resolved the problem. If not then post the on-going problem and a HijackThis log in the Security Forum.

If DiskPatch (http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/DiskPatch.htm)fixed the problem then it's likely it was a corrupt boot sector or invalid partition table since the underlying data of the recovery partition seems to have been unaffected. There are a number of utilities that can do similar work including TestDisk and BiNG.

References to the CD quoted have been removed. It contains commercial software and is piracy/warez and support for which is not tolerated on these boards. Sorry.