Resolved Invalid Partition Error

I'm working on an older Dell XPS M1330 that was originally setup with Vista Business, but was reformatted to run Windows XP SP2. One of our remote users sent it in to our HQ after reporting that at start up his system would come up with Invalid Partition Error.

I've tried using the Windows XP disk in the computer and booting directly from it, but instead of giving me an option to use the Recovery Console from the disk, I get an error saying that the drive is missing. I do have a combo IDE/SATA USB utility and I've got the SATA HDD plugged into my system. I can "see" the HDD and it comes up without a problem. I can even see all of the user's files in Windows, but the laptop will not start into Windows. I would prefer to not have to reformat the drive, but I'm afraid that will be the only option for it.

Any other ideas? I will note that when I do plug the USB utility connected to the SATA drive in, it does come up with 3 separate drives for the device. One is the Recovery partition, the Local Disk, and the last is MEDIADIRECT.

Thanks for the assistance.

 

See this thread here. Its not altogether dissimilar from the situation you're in.

I used MiniTool Partition Wizard Bootable CD to repair that HD. Once you have it repaired, you should image it using either Acronis True Image (Paid program - but my preferred choice) or Clonezilla (Free) in case you run into similar problems to the ones I ran into after the repair. In my case the drive was failing and had numerous faulty sectors. Partition Wizard does have scanning tools to check the HD though so you should be able to judge whether the drive is dying or not.

 

Normally that error is due to no Active partition or more likely more the 1 Active partition.

What OS is on the comp that you are connecting it to ?

I'm running linux so can not verify, but think if you get into 'disk management' it will show the active partitions.

 

To answer some of the questions:
1) It ran fine on XP and was sent to the user a bit over 4 months ago.
2) It could be that the user caused the error, but that's unknown since I can't find the exact cause of the issue.
3) OS of my desktop is Vista Ultimate 32 (fully tweaked to "work right" with full admin rights, only right since I'm the network admin as well).

I did try using the Partition Wizard to recover the pair of boot sectors along with the main partition, but that didn't do any good for the system.

It looks like I'm stuck removing the user's data over to my PC and then moving it on to a flash/external drive. Then going to use the Partition Wizard to overwrite everything with 1's and 0's.

 

Does Partition Wizard show up bad sectors?

 

Didn't see it when I used the boot version of it. The full version may...

I did try to plug the device in and managed to remove some data files, but the drive died part way through a multi-Gig documents move. It looks like the earlier problem was actually a harbinger of the eventual death of the drive.

 

AAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHH