Laptop does not boot. HD overwritten accidentally.

cmelblan

Estimable
Dec 15, 2014
2
0
4,520
Laptop's hard disk with dual boot W7Pro & LinuxMint17 overwritten accidentally with a program called winimage.exe. It has been "inserted" an image of a floppy disk (1.44 mb). Now the laptop does not boot. I've been testing and trying so hard to recover it by using TestDisk. At last I can see the files from W7 and linux, but the hard disk is still unable to boot.
The program gparted shows an unique device FAT16 with a total capacity of 250gb, 415kb used and 1mb free !
Please help !! I don't know how to solve this, it's driving me mad !
which utility can I use to solve this? I think gparted can't mend it.
I'll post some screenshots later, now I don't know how to do it...
Hope somebody knows how to proceed !

 
Solution
Uuuff, at last I could make it work. Thanks to the awesome TestDisk, all I had to do is to make the changes and write but several times it reported a write error and couldn't continue. I used a live cd linux, installed testdisk (new version) and finally I could write the changes, later with Gparted I made some other changes and the HD came to life (and saved mine too). It's true that this has been unpleasant, it took me almost 2 days to find problem and fix it. At last, the outcome of this ugly experience is that (apart of having always backup copies, that I always have) we should always be very careful when using imagedisk writers like winimage or others, and for every thing it may happen we should also be prepared and with the...

D_Know_WD

Estimable
Hi there cmelblan,

That is unpleasant. :(

I would agree with Hamperking68, you will need to perform a clean install.
As you can see the data with the partition/data recovery tools that you use, you can just recover it to another location(hard drive, flash drive, etc).

Cheers,
D_Know_WD
 

cmelblan

Estimable
Dec 15, 2014
2
0
4,520
Uuuff, at last I could make it work. Thanks to the awesome TestDisk, all I had to do is to make the changes and write but several times it reported a write error and couldn't continue. I used a live cd linux, installed testdisk (new version) and finally I could write the changes, later with Gparted I made some other changes and the HD came to life (and saved mine too). It's true that this has been unpleasant, it took me almost 2 days to find problem and fix it. At last, the outcome of this ugly experience is that (apart of having always backup copies, that I always have) we should always be very careful when using imagedisk writers like winimage or others, and for every thing it may happen we should also be prepared and with the correct tools for every incidence. Reformatting the HD is always the last option because it would imply a lot of time (not only days but weeks ) to restore completely the system. And time is gold.
 
Solution