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#41
Good morning Arc. Doing a Rebuild MBR makes a lot of sense.
But I'm unclear on which drive you want to rebuild. I think you're saying the internal drive labelled Valiant should be the one. However, the OS on Valiant is the one from several months ago--it is not the latest running OS and appears not to have been my "C:" drive (user profiles are old, etc.)
Regarding,
Is it possible this happened as a result of formatting/deleting the recovery partition on the Valiant drive? I was instructed to do that a week ago (if you dig back to page 3 of this thread)? Or possibly when I botched the Startup Repair yesterday by powering off in the middle of it? It was this latter event that rendered the system unbootable.But its partition structure is corrupt.
And this corruption (unallocation and conversion to logical of the boot device) is an indication of a malware; a special type of bad malware called bootkit/rootkit.
Admittedly, I'm no expert on how Windows decides where to find itself when booting, but it would be really good if Windows found itself on the unlabelled external drive which certainly has my latest "C:" drive files (user profile, etc.). Is the partition structure on the unlabelled external drive also corrupted?
If it is at all possible to get the unlabelled external drive to boot up, I could continue working this week. And since I now understand what the original problem was, I can take steps to clone the running OS from the external drive back to an internal drive using something like Partition Wizard. Would it be possible to do that?
Thanks.
EDIT: Going back to the original Disk Management dump (page 2 of this thread), I can see now the following:
C: (unlabelled), 232.00 GB --> external drive (originally thought to be Valiant)
- originally Healthy (Boot, Page File, Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition) [Partition Wizard now shows as Primary, System]
+ 450 MB Healthy (Recovery Partition) [Partition Wizard now shows as Primary, Active & Boot]
+ 450 MB Healthy (Recovery Partition) [Partition Wizard now shows as Primary, None]
V: (Valiant), 232.44 GB --> now known to be an internal drive
- original Healthy (Active, Primary Partition) [Partition Wizard now shows as Primary, Active & Boot]
+ 450 MB Healthy (Recovery Partition) [Partition Wizard now shows as Logical, None] <- because we deleted it on page 3 of the thread.
Z: (Zodiac), 232.88 GB --> internal drive
- original Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition) [Partition Wizard now shows as Primary, Active]
So if I understand correctly, the original boot order would be find boot loader on Z: (Zodiac) because it was marked "System", then load the OS found on unlabelled external drive because it was marked "Boot" (plus all the other flags).
Now, if I understand correctly, the boot order is find boot loader on unlabelled external drive first partition because it is now marked "System", the load the OS found either on unlabelled external drive second partition marked "Active & Boot" or on V: (Valiant) marked as "Active & Boot". I suspect it is not trying Valiant because, with all three drives connected, or with unlabelled and Zodiac only, the boot fails with the following:
Attachment 87438
Do you think it is possible to use Partition Wizard to patch this boot sequence back to something that gets me running again?
Last edited by PhabGuy; 29 Jun 2016 at 13:50.